How do you expose pagination, filtering, and sorting safely in a Spring API?

The controller owns transport parsing, while the application defines a query object and the persistence section later implements it efficiently. Cursors are opaque, signed or integrity-protected when clients must not alter state, and versioned when their encoding can change. I test concurrent inserts, duplicate sort values, empty pages, and filter changes because stable pagination is a behavioral contract. Metrics track expensive filter combinations and deep offsets so the API can evolve before abuse becomes an outage.