various problems with partial lists

I'm having several different problems with trying to get a partial list to be shown. (I'm using a partial list because the data list could be very long, and I don't want to need to find all of it at once.) The object I'm trying to show has, essentially, three fields, an ID, a date, and a title.

If I don't bother implementing the PaginatedList interface, and just pass pageSize (or less) objects in, specifying external sort, partial list, and size, I get the correct data displayed, but the table header always says that I'm showing records 1 through pageSize (or less, if last page), no matter what page I'm actually on.

I tried to get around this by padding out the List with bogus records. ie: I would be getting the first page, so I would actually retrieve those, but just have bogus data in the rest of the positions. This would work fine with the initial sort, but would only show one page in any other sort (either first or last page), and would mostly display one page off. So if I wanted to display the second page, it would show in the header that it was displaying, for example, the 6th through 10th records, but it would actually show the 11th through 15th ones.

So finally, I tried implementing the PaginatedList interface. This worked almost perfectly. It was a bit annoying that the arguments changed, but not a big deal. What was more of a problem, however, was that I couldn't reverse the sort order. I could change it, but the link for the date column sort was always for ascending order. For some reason, it was never for descending. So I couldn't even test for reverse sorting.