Question

I am working on a ASP.NET MVC application where we have to write our own code for paging.
And I see elements getting repeated on different pages. This is happening because the order of elements in the IQueryable varies randomly and one have to query the database for each page.
I solved this problem by ordering the elements by date of creation and then the order I wanted. But I feels its heavy. Is there a better way to solve this problem.

Answer 1

If you fetch rows from a database via IQuerable and order on one column, if there are rows that have the same value in that column the order of those rows may vary, you need to do as you do now, that is order by two columns, first the one you are really interested in and then the second (like date), there should not be that big a performance hit since the sorting is done in the database.

But what need to do is specify the ordering like this:

  Context.Products
   .Where(p => p.ProductID > 100)
   .OrderBy(p => p.CategoryID)
    .ThenBy(p => p.Date).ToList();

Notice the ThenBy, that will generate the correct SQL.