Should I return IEnumerable or IQueryable from my DAL?

Question

I know this could be opinion, but I\'m looking for best practices.

As I understand, IQueryable implements IEnumerable, so

Answer 1

You can use IQueryable and accept that someone could create a scenario where a SELECT N+1 could happen. This is a disadvantage, along with the fact that you may end up with code that is specific to your repository implementation in the layers above your repository. The advantage of this is that you are allowing the delegation common operations like paging and sorting to be expressed outside of your respository, therefore alleviating it of such concerns. It is also more flexible if you need to join the data with other database tables, as the query will remain an expression, so can be added to before its resolved into a query and hits the database.

The alternative is to lock down your repository so that it returns materialised lists by calling ToList(). With the example of paging and sorting, you will need to pass in skip, take and a sort expression as parameters to the methods of your repository, and use the parameters to return only a window of results. This means that the repository is taking on the responsibility of paging and sorting, and all of the projection of your data.

This is a bit of a judgement call, do you give your application the power of linq, and have less complexity in the repository, or do you control your data access. For me it depends on the number of queries associated with each entity, and combinations of entities, and where I want to manage that complexity.