What are common mistakes with Cursor (pagination)?

Stopping after the first page. Restarting from the beginning after a failure instead of the last cursor.

Core concepts

Intermediate

Cursor (pagination)

A pointer used in paginated API responses to fetch the next page of results. Critical for workflows that must retrieve all records without cursor handling, you only get the first 100 records, missing the rest silently.

Expert insight

Cursor-based pagination (a token pointing to "the next page") is more reliable than page-number pagination for data that changes while you're paging through it, page-number pagination can skip or duplicate records if items are added or removed mid-fetch, cursor pagination doesn't have this problem because each cursor is tied to a specific position in the underlying data, not a shifting page count.

In a real workflow

The API returns 100 records and a cursor; the workflow passes the cursor to get the next page until none is left.

Common mistakes

Stopping after the first page.
Restarting from the beginning after a failure instead of the last cursor.

Complexity level

Intermediate

Requires some familiarity with automation concepts.

Related terms

REST API

The most common API architecture. Uses standard HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, DE…

Pagination

The practice of splitting large API responses across multiple pages. Most APIs r…

Loop / iterator

A workflow pattern that processes a list of items one by one. Example: for each …

Quick facts

Category Core concepts

Level

Intermediate

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