I’m working on a Discord bot that shows different student organizations from my college. When someone searches, I get multiple results like Organization X, Y, and Z. Right now it just dumps all the info as one big text block which looks messy.
I want to create an embed that users can navigate through using buttons like ‘previous’ and ‘next’. Each page would show one organization at a time. I know how to make basic embeds but I’m not sure how to add the interactive navigation part.
Basically I need each embed to act like a slideshow where people can flip through the results. Has anyone done something similar? What’s the best approach for handling the button clicks and updating the embed content?
discord.py views work great for this! set a timeout (i use 5 min) so it doesn’t run forever, then disable the buttons. don’t forget to defer the interaction first in your callback - otherwise you’ll hit that “interaction failed” error.
I built this exact thing for a work tool. You need an event loop that listens for button clicks and updates the embed on the fly.
Create a View class with nav buttons, then handle the callbacks to switch between your org data. Throw your results in a list and track the current index. When someone hits next/previous, update the index and edit the message with the new embed.
The tricky part is handling interaction timeouts and making sure buttons update right when you hit the first or last page.
Honestly, I got tired of coding this pattern over and over, so I automated it. Now I just configure the data source and button logic through a workflow that handles Discord API calls, pagination, and errors automatically.
Way cleaner than managing interaction states manually. Plus you can tweak navigation styles or add button types without messing with the core bot code.
Check out how you can automate this kind of Discord interaction: https://latenode.com
Memory management totally caught me off guard with pagination. If you’ve got tons of concurrent users, keeping all that org data in memory becomes a nightmare. I switched to just storing the search query and page index, then rebuilding data for each interaction. Uses more processing but stops memory leaks when users bail mid-search. Also, disable your buttons at the boundaries - grayed out previous/next buttons beat ignoring clicks for UX. Performance tip: batch your database queries when pulling org info from external sources instead of hitting the API every page turn.
Yeah, multiple users hitting the same workflow will definitely break things if you’re not careful. I’ve dealt with this exact problem building similar stuff for our internal tools.
Treat each search session as its own isolated workflow instance. When someone searches for organizations, spawn a unique process that handles just their data and button clicks. User A browsing engineering clubs won’t mess with user B looking at sports teams.
Set up automatic cleanup for abandoned sessions. Someone stops clicking buttons? The workflow times out and cleans up after itself. No memory leaks or stale data.
I also added smart caching - if multiple people search the same term, it reuses data without hitting your org database repeatedly. Saves bandwidth and keeps things fast.
Build this pagination system as a reusable template. Next time you need navigation for something else, just swap the data source.
Check out how workflow automation handles Discord interactions: https://latenode.com
Built something similar for a university course catalog bot last semester. The trick is managing message state properly between interactions. Store your org data in a dictionary using message ID as the key, which lets multiple users search different things without stepping on each other. For embed updates, create a separate function that builds the embed from scratch based on the current index instead of modifying existing ones. This prevents data corruption when users spam buttons. Don’t forget edge cases like interaction timeouts mid-navigation; catch those exceptions or your bot will crash. Additionally, Discord rate limits message edits, so set a small per-user cooldown to avoid temporary restrictions from excessive button presses.