Paging & Sorting grids with ASP.Net MVC

Question

I'm new to MVC, and am not following how you'd do paging and sorting on a grid. I'm used to using the asp.Net GridView control with an ObjectDataSource pointed at objects in our business layer - and in that case the ODS handles all of the paging & sorting using the methods that our ORM generates on the objects.

I've looked at using the same ORM with MVC - and things work out fine there - i just loop thru the collections to build the table on the page - but without the ODS to handle the paging & sorting, i'm confused as to how I'd handle that. Would I have a separate controller for the paging and sorting?

I understand that I need to roll my own - but where do I start? I've created a CustomerController, and a view that displays a table of customers that looks like below - and I want to sort on FirstName or LastName columns. My Model has a Sort() method on it that'll take a string sort expression in the format that would be used by a GridView/ODS pair. Would I create a new Action on my CustomerController called Sort, and put an ActionLink in my header?

    <table>
    <tr>
        <th>
            First Name
        </th>
        <th>
            Last Name
        </th>
    </tr>
    <% foreach (var item in Model)
       { %>
    <tr>
        <td>
            <%= Html.Encode(item.FirstName) %>
        </td>
        <td>
            <%= Html.Encode(item.LastName) %>
        </td>
    </tr>
    <% } %>
</table>

Answer 1

nowadays MVC 3 now has a webGrid out of the box. I know this question is from a while ago, but I ended up on it when looking for something about webGrid. So I thought it should have an answer mentioning the new webGrid.

Here are a few good posts on how to use it:

http://www.dotnetcurry.com/ShowArticle.aspx?ID=615

http://cnug.co.in/blogs/shijuv/archive/2010/10/08/using-the-webgrid-helper-in-asp-net-mvc-3-beta.aspx

http://www.nickharris.net/tag/webgrid/

It supports sorting, paging and also some Ajax stuff. It can do lot for you already, but you can also specify every separate column separately.

Update:
There are also many JavaScript libraries available that can do the table for you. I personally like to use DataTables. You can feed it an existing html table generated on the server or give it an endpoint where it can retrieve the data (all or just one page).

There are plenty more, just Google around.