Sorting and Pagination: limit(), skip(), and Cursor-Based Paging

Almost every list view is sorted and paginated, whether it is a product catalog, an order history, or an admin dashboard. The client asks for page 2 of products, sorted newest first, and the database must return a consistent, ordered slice. This lesson covers ordering with sort(), common offset-based pagination with limit() and skip(), the performance problem that offset pagination can create as result sets grow, and the cursor-based pattern that avoids large offsets.

Note: The examples run against the seeded ecommerce collections. Shell snippets need no connection; the Mongoose example opens a local connection to mongodb://127.0.0.1:27017/ecommerce.

To make paging concrete, the next visual should contrast offset-based and cursor-based pagination:

That starts with putting results in order.

Ordering results with sort()

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