ASP.NET Core MVC Interview Question #148

How should pagination be implemented for large MVC result sets?

Dependency Injection, Services, Error Handling, Logging & Performance Senior Advanced

Quick Interview Answer

Large result sets should be paginated at the data source rather than loading every record and then displaying only one page. A query commonly applies a deterministic OrderBy followed by Skip and Take, or uses keyset pagination for suitable high-scale scenarios.

Detailed Explanation

The ViewModel should include the current page and enough metadata to generate navigation. Always validate page-size limits so a client cannot request an unbounded amount of data.

Code Example

const int pageSize = 20;

var items = await query
    .OrderBy(p => p.Id)
    .Skip((page - 1) * pageSize)
    .Take(pageSize)
    .ToListAsync(token);