Better way to query a page of data and get total count in entity framework 4.1?

Question

Currently when I need to run a query that will be used w/ paging I do it something like this:

//Setup query (Typically much more complex)
var q = ctx.People.Where(p=>p.Name.StartsWith("A"));

//Get total result count prior to sorting
int total = q.Count();       

//Apply sort to query
q = q.OrderBy(p => p.Name);  

q.Select(p => new PersonResult
{
   Name = p.Name
}.Skip(skipRows).Take(pageSize).ToArray();

This works, but I wondered if it is possible to improve this to be more efficient while still using linq? I couldn't think of a way to combine the count w/ the data retrieval in a single trip to the DB w/o using a stored proc.

Answer 1

The following query will get the count and page results in one trip to the database, but if you check the SQL in LINQPad, you'll see that it's not very pretty. I can only imagine what it would look like for a more complex query.

var query = ctx.People.Where (p => p.Name.StartsWith("A"));

var page = query.OrderBy (p => p.Name)
                .Select (p => new PersonResult { Name = p.Name } )          
                .Skip(skipRows).Take(pageSize)
                .GroupBy (p => new { Total = query.Count() })
                .First();

int total = page.Key.Total;
var people = page.Select(p => p);

For a simple query like this, you could probably use either method (2 trips to the database, or using GroupBy to do it in 1 trip) and not notice much difference. For anything complex, I think a stored procedure would be the best solution.