Paging & Sorting grids with ASP.Net MVC

Answer 1

First use jQuery. jQuery is your friend. Then use this awesome and probably the best Grid control for jQuery jqGrid.

In your CustomerController create an action called CustomerData. All interaction with the Grid should point to this action.

Go here for tons of examples on how to use jqGrid.

Answer 2

With MVC you sort of have to roll your own sorting, paging, etc. I would suggest YUI DataTable or some of the other JavaScript Grids out there.

Also if you find your self doing heavy Data Grid work you may want to take a look at ASP.NET Dynamic Data, it is specifically designed for these types of interactions against ORM's.

Answer 3

Your can use the same controller, just add an additional parameter and name it sort. Then check in the controller what value sort has, and sort your data based on that parameter.

Or if you want to do things on the client side, you can use something like tablesorter, a plugin for jquery.

Answer 4

We have been using client side control JqxGrid from JqWidgets and much satisfied with its performance related to huge number of records along with paging, filtering, sorting inbuilt within. Here is an example of binding it within ASP.Net MVC

Answer 5

nowadays MVC 3 now has a webGrid out of the box. I know this question is from a while ago, but I ended up on it when looking for something about webGrid. So I thought it should have an answer mentioning the new webGrid.

Here are a few good posts on how to use it:

http://www.dotnetcurry.com/ShowArticle.aspx?ID=615

http://cnug.co.in/blogs/shijuv/archive/2010/10/08/using-the-webgrid-helper-in-asp-net-mvc-3-beta.aspx

http://www.nickharris.net/tag/webgrid/

It supports sorting, paging and also some Ajax stuff. It can do lot for you already, but you can also specify every separate column separately.

Update:
There are also many JavaScript libraries available that can do the table for you. I personally like to use DataTables. You can feed it an existing html table generated on the server or give it an endpoint where it can retrieve the data (all or just one page).

There are plenty more, just Google around.