How do you page a collection with LINQ?

Question

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

Answer 1

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);

Answer 2

A few months back I wrote a blog post about Fluent Interfaces and LINQ which used an Extension Method on IQueryable 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.

Answer 3

You might want to take a look at Rob Conery's PagedList.