Trick in Data Grid

The ASP.NET DataGrid exposes a wonderful capability: data paging support. When paging is enabled in the DataGrid, a fixed number of records is shown at a time. Additionally, paging UI is also shown at the bottom of the DataGrid for navigating through the records. The paging UI allows you to navigate backwards and forwards through displayed data, displaying a fixed number of records at a time.

There's one slight wrinkle. Paging with the DataGrid requires all of the data to be bound to the grid. For example, your data layer will need to return all of the data and then the DataGrid will filter all the displayed records based on the current page. If 100,000 records are returned when you're paging through the DataGrid, 99,975 records would be discarded on each request (assuming a page size of 25). As the number of records grows, the performance of the application will suffer as more and more data must be sent on each request.

One good approach to writing better paging code is to use stored procedures. Figure 2 shows a sample stored procedure that pages through the Orders table in the Northwind database. In a nutshell, all you're doing here is passing in the page index and the page size. The appropriate resultset is calculated and then returned.

CREATE PROCEDURE northwind_OrdersPaged ( @PageIndex int, @PageSize int ) AS BEGIN DECLARE @PageLowerBound int DECLARE @PageUpperBound int DECLARE @RowsToReturn int -- First set the rowcount SET @RowsToReturn = @PageSize * (@PageIndex + 1) SET ROWCOUNT @RowsToReturn -- Set the page bounds SET @PageLowerBound = @PageSize * @PageIndex SET @PageUpperBound = @PageLowerBound + @PageSize + 1 -- Create a temp table to store the select results CREATE TABLE #PageIndex ( IndexId int IDENTITY (1, 1) NOT NULL, OrderID int ) -- Insert into the temp table INSERT INTO #PageIndex (OrderID) SELECT OrderID FROM Orders ORDER BY OrderID DESC -- Return total count SELECT COUNT(OrderID) FROM Orders -- Return paged results SELECT O.* FROM Orders O, #PageIndex PageIndex WHERE O.OrderID = PageIndex.OrderID AND PageIndex.IndexID > @PageLowerBound AND PageIndex.IndexID < @PageUpperBound ORDER BY PageIndex.IndexID END

In Community Server, we wrote a paging server control to do all the data paging. You'll see that I am using the ideas discussed in Tip 1, returning two resultsets from one stored procedure: the total number of records and the requested data.

The total number of records returned can vary depending on the query being executed. For example, a WHERE clause can be used to constrain the data returned. The total number of records to be returned must be known in order to calculate the total pages to be displayed in the paging UI. For example, if there are 1,000,000 total records and a WHERE clause is used that filters this to 1,000 records, the paging logic needs to be aware of the total number of records to properly render the paging UI.