How to efficiently implement pagination with IQueryable in ASP.NET Core 6?
I've been banging my head against this for hours... I'm collaborating on a project where I'm deploying to production and I'm getting frustrated with I'm working on an ASP.NET Core 6 application using Entity Framework Core, and I'm trying to implement pagination for a list of products retrieved from my database... My current implementation fetches all products and then applies pagination in memory, which is not efficient for large datasets. I would like to know the best way to handle pagination directly in the database query. I started with a query like this: ```csharp var products = await _context.Products.ToListAsync(); ``` Then, I tried to implement pagination by skipping and taking items: ```csharp int pageNumber = 2; int pageSize = 10; var paginatedProducts = products.Skip((pageNumber - 1) * pageSize).Take(pageSize).ToList(); ``` While this works, the performance is poor with large datasets. I'm receiving a `System.InvalidOperationException` when I try to paginate on a `DbSet` directly, which says "The LINQ expression '...ToListAsync()' want to be translated into a store expression." I want to modify my query to handle pagination without loading all items into memory first. I've looked into `Skip()` and `Take()` methods on `IQueryable`, but I'm not sure how to proceed correctly. Here's what I've tried: ```csharp var paginatedProducts = await _context.Products.Skip((pageNumber - 1) * pageSize).Take(pageSize).ToListAsync(); ``` This should ideally return only the products for the current page, but I still face issues with the total count when displaying the pagination links. I compute the total count like this: ```csharp var totalProducts = await _context.Products.CountAsync(); ``` However, Iām frequently running into issues where the total count does not reflect the filtered results when I apply additional filtering criteria. How can I implement this correctly to get both the paginated results and the total count for the filtered dataset without impacting performance? Any best practices or code examples would be greatly appreciated! Any ideas how to fix this? I'm working in a Windows 10 environment. Has anyone dealt with something similar? This is for a service running on CentOS. Has anyone else encountered this? I'm using Csharp stable in this project. Has anyone dealt with something similar?