How to pass the custom "skip" value to the Local API Find operation to skip concrete N docs?

[MurzNN]

According to the documentation here https://payloadcms.com/docs/local-api/overview#collection-find, to skip the first N items, we can use only the page value, which allows using only numbers that are multiples of the page number.

But, in my case, I need to skip a custom number of docs in the query.

A simplified example could be a "News" page:
At the top of the page, there should be a "Fresh news" block that displays the 5 most recent news as large, detailed blocks, with a large image and a full-sized header, summary.

But the next block below "Other recent news" should display 20 next news items as small blocks - only title and concatenated summary, skipping the first 5 news, as they already displayed in the previous block.

So, in the "Other recent news" I should execute a query with params like "limit 20, skip 5", but Payload Local API doesn't allow this:

• if I use the "limit = 20, page = 2" it will skip 20 items instead of 5.
• if I use the "limit = 5, page = 2", it will skip 5, but retrieve only 5 items instead of 20.

So, is there any solution for this issue? If not, maybe it's worth adding a new argument "skip" to the Payload Local API Find operation?

[zubricks]

Payload doesn't currently support an offset/skip parameter — pagination is page-based only.

For your specific use case though, you could do something like this:

// Top 5 most recent
const featured = await payload.find({
  collection: 'news',
  limit: 5,
  sort: '-publishedAt',
})

// Next 20, excluding the ones already shown
const featuredIds = featured.docs.map(doc => doc.id)

const others = await payload.find({
  collection: 'news',
  limit: 20,
  sort: '-publishedAt',
  where: {
    id: {
      not_in: featuredIds,
    },
  },
})

That should work reliably as long as you're sorting by a stable field.

[MurzNN]

Yes, this works, thank you for the example. But this approach requires passing the data from one block to another, which will make them coupled, which is not good.
Actually, I resolved the task by just querying 25 and skipping the first 5 docs in the second block, seems it is the best solution for now, until skip is added to the Payload API.

[itxashancode]

Payload doesn't support a skip param in the local API, so you'll need to work around it. The cleanest approach is to query all the data you need in one call, then split it in memory. For example:

const allNews = await payload.find({
 collection: 'news',
 limit: 25,
 sort: '-publishedAt',
});

const featured = allNews.slice(0, 5);
const otherRecent = allNews.slice(5, 25);

This avoids multiple DB hits and keeps pagination logic in your code. If you need more control or want to avoid loading everything at once, you could use the REST API directly with a custom skip query param, but that means bypassing the local API. Adding a skip param to the local API has been requested before, but it's not on the roadmap yet. For now, slicing the result set is the most efficient pattern.

[MurzNN]

Thank you for the example, these blocks are two independent blocks, so a solution with "slice" will not work. I couldn't find a request to add the skip parameter, so created a new fresh one: #16249 - let's upvote it, or merge as a duplicate with the previous one, if it exists.

[itxashancode]

Hope it helped! 😊 A follow would be lovely, always great to connect!