Question

I have an ascx user control with and Entity Framework IQueryable property like this:

  public IQueryable<Category> DataSource
    {
        get { return ViewState["Category"] as IQueryable; }
        set { ViewState["Category"] = value; }
    }

As you can see, I tried to use ViewState to persist the value and don’t have to set it on every postback but it says type is not marked as serializable…

how can I mark this as serializable?, is it recomendable to save this property on ViewState or is it better to set in on every postback?

Answer 1

Basically, IQueryable is not serializable because it’s not data. The query is like the means to an end, not the end itself.

I would save the result set in the Cache, not ViewState.