Drupal 7 pager from module fuction not displaying in page.tpl

Question

I have a function mymodule_submissions in my module which fetches rows from mymodule_table and prints as table theme with pager. Its working fine if I define a menu link in my module to call that function. Pager not printing when I call the same function from a page.tpl.

function mymodule_submissions() { 

   $query = db_select('mymodule_table', 'uf');
   $query = $query->condition('uid', $user->uid)
             ->fields('mytable', array('id', 'name', 'createdtime'))
             ->orderBy('createdtime', 'DESC')->limit(3);
   $results = $query->execute();
   $header = array('ID','Name','Created Time');

   $rows = array();

   foreach($results As $result) {
      $rows[] = array( $result -> id, $result -> name, $result -> createdtime,);
   }

   $output .= theme('table', array('header' => $header, 'rows' => $rows,) );

   $output .= theme('pager');
   return $output;
}

From page.tpl, I am calling this function link below

print render(mymodule_submissions());

Anything I'm doing wrong?

Answer 1

You just need to add ->extend('PagerDefault');

$query = db_select('mymodule_table', 'uf')->extend('PagerDefault');

I find the examples module really useful. They have a pager example.

For what its worth I think using the Drupal db API with theming is a perfectly valid way forward that has a lot of strengths: it's efficient, flexible, powerful and you can put it in version control. Obviously you should use the best thing for the situation.