Question

I have WCF server and silverlight client. The client call the server to get list of items.

There is some cases that the item list is very big and I want to have the ability to get the items in more then one call –

• Call1 => get the items 0-100
• Call2 ( if the user click on ‘more’ button ) => get the item 101-200
• .
• .
• Call N => get the 100*n – 100*(n+1) items.

How can I do it ?

Is there some ‘easy’ pattern to do it ?

Thanks.

Answer 1

If you have a standard page size of 100 then have the client pass the page they want to the service. Or get the client to tell the service how big their pages are and which page they want

You could hold in memory on the service which page the client has and then have then say “Next” but holding in-memory state in the service on behalf of the client reduces scalability and increases fragility (if that state is lost then the client has to start paging again.

making the client explicitly say what they want is a more robust and scalable solution and has an easy LINQ implementation with Skip and Take