Pagination - blank pages and weird numbering

Question

I have enough results for 2 pages, but my pagination links show 3 pages of results, the 3rd page being blank. Also, the segment that should show the pagination page number (i.e. P1, P2) says P2 for the second page, and then jumps to P4 on the third page. Anyone ever seen this before?

{exp:channel:entries channel="message" dynamic="no" limit="2" paginate="bottom" orderby="date" sort="desc" disable="categories|category_fields|member_data"}
        {series_association}
        {if series_association:no_results}
        <ul class="message-list">

            <li class="media-view">
            <h2><u><a href="{path=media/media-view/{url_title}}">{title}</a></u> - <i><h5 class="inline-header">{message_date format='%F %j, %Y'}</h5></i></h2> 
            <p>{message_summary}</p>
            </li>
        {/if}

        {if "{count}" == "{total_results}"}</ul>{/if}
        {/series_association}
        {paginate}

            <br /><p>Page {current_page} of {total_pages} pages {pagination_links}</p>

        {/paginate}

    {/exp:channel:entries}

Answer 1

The number jumping is dictated by the number of entries you're showing on the page. You have two entries, and so they go up in 2s, i.e.

Page 1: Entries 0 and 1

Page 2: Entries 2 and 3

Page 3: Entries 4 and 5

As for the blank page, the tag is paginating the channel entries returned from the channel entries tag. If there are 5 entries in the channel, you'll get 5 entries back and so 3 pages in the case. It doesn't look like you're outputting any content from the relationship, e.g. {series_association:title}, only if there are no results from the relationship?

Answer 2

As Dave has mentioned the number that you see in the URL (PXXX) does not have a correlation to the page that you are on in the sense that you think. In your example you have a limit of 2 entries per page so that is why you are seeing the number after P increment by 2 for each page. If you were to navigate to the second page then click the link back to the first page of entries you would see "P0" in the URL.

The number after P tells EE to offset the entries in the loop by that number. So in your example

Page 1: Entries 1 and 2 - URL Value: P0 - Offset Value: 0

Page 2: Entries 3 and 4 - URL Value: P2 - Offset Value: 2

Page 3: Entries 5 and 6 - URL Value: P4 - Offset Value: 4

Basically for page 2 of your results EE is automatically replacing this opening channel entires tag (notice the offset parameter being added)

{exp:channel:entries channel="message" dynamic="no" limit="2" offset="2" orderby="date" sort="desc" disable="categories|category_fields|member_data"}