Implementing paging in ASP.NET Core MVC

 This post is about how to implement paging in ASP.NET Core MVC applications. For the implementation I am using a nuget package - X.PagedList.Mvc.Core. In the controller action method we need to set the page as the argument like this.

public IActionResult Index(int? page = 1)
{
    if (page != null && page < 1)
    {
        page = 1;
    }

    var pageSize = 10;

    var shortLinks = _tinyLinksDatabaseContext.ShortLinks
        .OrderByDescending(s => s.CreatedAt)
        .ToPagedList(page ?? 1, pageSize);

    return View(shortLinks);
}

And in the Index view, we can configure the table and pager component. I am using Razor For loop and HTML table to build the table grid structure.

@model IPagedList<ShortLink>
@{
    ViewData["Title"] = "Home Page";
}

@if (Model != null && Model.Count > 1)
{
    <div class="table-responsive">
        <table class="table table-bordered">
            <thead>
                <tr>
                    <th scope="col">Url</th>
                    <th scope="col">ShortUrl</th>
                </tr>
            </thead>
            <tbody>
                @foreach (var shortLink in Model)
                {
                    <tr>
                        <td scope="col">@shortLink.Url</td>
                        <td scope="col">@shortLink.ShortUrl</td>
                    </tr>
                }
            </tbody>
        </table>
    </div>
}

And implement the Pager component like this. Since I am using Bootstrap library, I am using Bootstrap pager styles.

<nav>
@Html.PagedListPager(Model, page => Url.Action("index", new { page = page }), new PagedListRenderOptions()
{
    ActiveLiElementClass = "active",
    PageClasses = new[]{ "page-link"},
    LiElementClasses=new[] { "page-item" },
    UlElementClasses = new[] { "pagination","justify-content-center", "mt-3" },
    LinkToNextPageFormat = "Next",
    LinkToPreviousPageFormat = "Previous",
    MaximumPageNumbersToDisplay = 5,
    DisplayLinkToPreviousPage = PagedListDisplayMode.Always,
    DisplayLinkToNextPage = PagedListDisplayMode.Always
})
</nav>

The advantage of this approach is we don’t need to implement the paging logic in SQL code. We can see the Entity Framework core logs and we will be able to see the SQL query with paging parameters, like this.

And the data will be displayed like this with Bootstrap table and pager.

Paging will help you to improve the application performance by loading the data partially.