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Easily paginate collections in C#

Aug 27, 2009 archive

This post looks at how to easily paginate collections in C#, which can be easily achieved with two very basic extensions.

When paginating a collection in C#, I find the following extensions useful:

public static IEnumerable<TSource> Paginate<TSource>(this IEnumerable<TSource> source, int? page, int pageSize)
{
    return source.Skip((page ?? 0) * pageSize).Take(pageSize);
}

public static IQueryable<TSource> Paginate<TSource>(this IQueryable<TSource> source, int? page, int pageSize)
{
    return source.Skip((page ?? 0) * pageSize).Take(pageSize);
}

By adding them to an extension class within a certain namespace, all IQueryable and IEnumerable instances will automatically receives this functionality:

List<string> strings = new List<string> { "a","b","c","d","e","f" };
strings.Paginate(2, 2);

The pagination code above will return a list that contains “c” and “d”.