Paging a collection with LINQ

Question

How do you page through a collection in LINQ given that you have a startIndex and a count?

Mighell

Answer 1

A few months back I wrote a blog post about Fluent Interfaces and LINQ which used an Extension Method on IQueryable<T> and another class to provide the following natural way of paginating a LINQ collection.

var query = from i in ideas
            select i;
var pagedCollection = query.InPagesOf(10);
var pageOfIdeas = pagedCollection.Page(2);

You can get the code from the MSDN Code Gallery Page: Pipelines, Filters, Fluent API and LINQ to SQL.

Cultivar

Answer 2

It is very simple with the Skip and Take extension methods.

var query = from i in ideas
            select i;

var paggedCollection = query.Skip(startIndex).Take(count);

Mighell

I believe that it's OK to do something like this. He might have an answer but maybe he wants to see what other people can come up with as well. – Kemeny

This was originally posted during the first day of the beta period of StackOverflow, thus the 66 for the article ID. I was testing the system, for Jeff. Plus it seemed like useful information instead of the usual test crap that sometimes comes out of beta testing. – Mighell

Answer 3

I solved this a bit differently than what the others have as I had to make my own paginator, with a repeater. So I first made a collection of page numbers for the collection of items that I have:

// assumes that the item collection is "myItems"

int pageCount = (myItems.Count + PageSize - 1) / PageSize;

IEnumerable<int> pageRange = Enumerable.Range(1, pageCount);
   // pageRange contains [1, 2, ... , pageCount]

Using this I could easily partition the item collection into a collection of "pages". A page in this case is just a collection of items (IEnumerable<Item>). This is how you can do it using Skip and Take together with selecting the index from the pageRange created above:

IEnumerable<IEnumerable<Item>> pageRange
    .Select((page, index) => 
        myItems
            .Skip(index*PageSize)
            .Take(PageSize));

Of course you have to handle each page as an additional collection but e.g. if you're nesting repeaters then this is actually easy to handle.

---

The one-liner TLDR version would be this:

var pages = Enumerable
    .Range(0, pageCount)
    .Select((index) => myItems.Skip(index*PageSize).Take(PageSize));

Which can be used as this:

for (Enumerable<Item> page : pages) 
{
    // handle page

    for (Item item : page) 
    {
        // handle item in page
    }
}

Omsk

Answer 4

This question is somewhat old, but I wanted to post my paging algorithm that shows the whole procedure (including user interaction).

const int pageSize = 10;
const int count = 100;
const int startIndex = 20;

int took = 0;
bool getNextPage;
var page = ideas.Skip(startIndex);

do
{
    Console.WriteLine("Page {0}:", (took / pageSize) + 1);
    foreach (var idea in page.Take(pageSize))
    {
        Console.WriteLine(idea);
    }

    took += pageSize;
    if (took < count)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Next page (y/n)?");
        char answer = Console.ReadLine().FirstOrDefault();
        getNextPage = default(char) != answer && 'y' == char.ToLowerInvariant(answer);

        if (getNextPage)
        {
            page = page.Skip(pageSize);
        }
    }
}
while (getNextPage && took < count);

However, if you are after performance, and in production code, we're all after performance, you shouldn't use LINQ's paging as shown above, but rather the underlying IEnumerator to implement paging yourself. As a matter of fact, it is as simple as the LINQ-algorithm shown above, but more performant:

const int pageSize = 10;
const int count = 100;
const int startIndex = 20;

int took = 0;
bool getNextPage = true;
using (var page = ideas.Skip(startIndex).GetEnumerator())
{
    do 
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Page {0}:", (took / pageSize) + 1);

        int currentPageItemNo = 0;
        while (currentPageItemNo++ < pageSize && page.MoveNext())
        {
            var idea = page.Current;
            Console.WriteLine(idea);
        }

        took += pageSize;
        if (took < count)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Next page (y/n)?");
            char answer = Console.ReadLine().FirstOrDefault();
            getNextPage = default(char) != answer && 'y' == char.ToLowerInvariant(answer);
        }
    }
    while (getNextPage && took < count);
}

Explanation: The downside of using Skip() for multiple times in a "cascading manner" is, that it will not really store the "pointer" of the iteration, where it was last skipped. - Instead the original sequence will be front-loaded with skip calls, which will lead to "consuming" the already "consumed" pages over and over again. - You can prove that yourself, when you create the sequence ideas so that it yields side effects. -> Even if you have skipped 10-20 and 20-30 and want to process 40+, you'll see all side effects of 10-30 being executed again, before you start iterating 40+. The variant using IEnumerable's interface directly, will instead remember the position of the end of the last logical page, so no explicit skipping is needed and side effects won't be repeated.

Cholula