Question

I am in the process of makeing a small script that will take all files from a pre-defined folder on the server, list them, sorted by name, with a pager and a way of grouping them by [A], [B] etc. navigation.

My thoughs were to loop through all the files and put them in a Array/List/Directonary (?) and then make a Gridview/Datagrid/Listview (?) to show the files, and handle the default paging.

Looking for inputs on the best way to achieve this based on the above – any inputs and/or snippets/examples would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

If you want more flexibility this is easy to do with LINQ.

var pageSize = 25;
var pageNum = 1;

var currentPage = Directory.GetFiles("dir_path").Skip((pageNum - 1) * pageSize).Take(pageSize);

// Do something with the results.

De/Incrementing pageNum on each next/prev (just make sure you take 0 & the max page num into consideration).

You can also include other linq operations like orderby, where, select, groupby, join, etc.

From your comment:

In the above example you can call methods on currentPage like .ToArray() / .ToList() / .ToDictionary() in order to form the data into the collection that best suits your needs.

An example using System.Windows.Forms.ListView:

Order the items, convert them to an array of ListViewItem and then use AddRange() on the list view’s item collection to add them to it.

var myListView = new ListView();
var allItems = currentPage.OrderBy(c => c).Select(c => new ListViewItem(c)).ToArray();
myListView.Items.AddRange(allItems);