A Tale of Valentica

A class for creating different types of pagination link in Asp.Net Mvc.

Pagination For Asp.Net Mvc

Introduction

I was looking for a pagination class to use in Asp.Net Mvc. I found ASP.NET MVC: PagedList<T> and ASP.NET MVC – Pagination View User Control. But I felt for an easier and customizable pagination class. I have developed many projects using CodeIgniter framework and that time I found their pagination class is pretty better and easier. So, I have decided to prepare a pagination class like this for Asp.Net Mvc.

Using the Code

Controller

In your controller, to get your current (i.e. selected) page number put this code snippet.

string pageString = "";
 
try
{
    pageString = Request.Url.Segments[3];
}
catch (Exception)
{
    pageString = null;
}
 
int page = (String.IsNullOrEmpty(pageString)) ? 1 : Int32.Parse(pageString);

Here 3 is the segment which holds the page number. It can vary as per your URL.

Then use the pagination class as shown in the following example.

Pagination pagination = new Pagination();
 
pagination.BaseUrl      = "/Users/List/";
pagination.TotalRows    = totalRows;
pagination.CurPage      = page;
pagination.PerPage      = 10;
 
string pageLinks = pagination.GetPageLinks();
 
int start   = (page - 1) * pagination.PerPage;
int offset  = pagination.PerPage;

In BaseUrl you can write full path like "http://www.sitename.com/Controller/Action/" or relative path like "/Controller/Action/". Here "start" is the number from which row should be counted and "offset" is the number of rows should be returned. “totalRows” is the total number of rows.

Now you can use this "pageLinks" string which is the generated page link.

Next, set your data in the ViewData like the following.

ViewData["title"]       = "Pagination in Asp.Net Mvc";
ViewData["totalRows"]   = totalRows;
ViewData["result"]      = result;
ViewData["pageLinks"]   = pageLinks;

Here, "totalRows" is the total number of rows and "result" is the desired resultset.

View

In view page, you can show the page link as follows:

<% if ((string)ViewData["pageLinks"] != "")
   { %>
   <%= ViewData["pageLinks"] %>
   <br /><br />
<% } %>

Model

You can create a model and make two methods to get total rows and the data from table using LINQ, as shown in the following example.

public int GetTotalUsers()
{
    return new MyDataContext().Users.Count();
}
 
public List GetUsers(int start, int offset)
{
    var users = new MyDataContext().Users.Skip(start)
                                                 .Take(offset);
 
    return users.ToList();
}

Configuration Settings

You can set configuration settings in three ways.

1. Set as regular property is set. Example:

objPagination.PerPage  = 10;
objPagination.PrevLink = "Prev";
objPagination.NextLink = "Next";

2. Put a Pagination.xml file in "Content" folder and create object of Pagination class as:

Pagination objPagination = new Pagination(true);

Pagination.xml file should be as following pattern as example.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<Pagination>
    <NumLinks><![CDATA[5]]></NumLinks>
    <FullTagOpen><![CDATA[<p class='pagination'>]]></FullTagOpen>
    <FullTagClose><![CDATA[</p>]]></FullTagClose>
    <CurTagOpen><![CDATA[<span class='current'>]]></CurTagOpen>
    <CurTagClose><![CDATA[</span>]]></CurTagClose>
</Pagination>

3. Create a any xml file like the above Pagination.xml file and call the method LoadPaginationXml with the file full path as argument. Example:

objPagination.LoadPaginationXml("C:\MyProject\MyPagination.xml");

Different types of pagination

By this pagination class you can build different types of page link for your page. Just call the method GetPageLinks with your desired PaginationType as argument. Example:

objPagination.GetPageLinks(PaginationType.FirstPreviousNextLastItemRight);

If you want to display item set item type as follows:

objPagination.ItemType = ItemTypes.Page;

Conclusion

I think thats enough to use this pagination class easily. Bye for this time.

Download

You can download the Pagination class from here.

PaginationClass

You can download sample project from here.

PaginationInAspNetMvc

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