Paging in Entity Framework

Question

In Entity Framework, using LINQ to Entities, database paging is usually done in following manner:

int totalRecords = EntityContext.Context.UserSet.Count;
var         


        

Answer 1

Hmmm... the actual call that uses paging is the second one - that's a single call.

The second call is to determine the total number of rows - that's quite a different operation, and I am not aware of any way you could combine those two distinct operations into a single database call with the Entity Framework.

Question is: do you really need the total number of rows? What for? Is that worth a second database call or not?

Another option you would have is to use the EntityObjectSource (in ASP.NET) and then bind this to e.g. a GridView, and enable AllowPaging and AllowSorting etc. on the GridView, and let the ASP.NET runtime handle all the nitty-gritty work of retrieving the appropriate data page and displaying it.

Marc