I am developing an application which includes a WCF service and its ASP.NET MVC client. The ASP.NET MVC website must display a grid of objects - say, products. These products are stored in database which is accessible through the WCF service. So somewhere inside an MVC controller I call WCF service's method that returns me an array of products that I need to display.
So what is my question? I want to implement a pager functionality for my products grid, because it is possible that there will be a lot of products. So there are several ways to do that:
- My controller can get the whole list of products and just do in-memory paging
- WCF can select all the products and store them somewhere in its cache, then pass to the controller only part of them, according to the requested page number.
- WCF can select only part of the products from the database, according to the requested page number.
- WCF can return IQueryable to the controller, and then the controller will select whatever he wants whenever he wants.
As far as I understand (and correct me if it is not true), the first option is useless, so I must choose between the others.
The second option wastes my server's memory.
The third option is OK, but it seems a little bit ugly to implement paging on the WCF side.
And the fourth option sounds confusing. I actually pass some kind of query to the client, and then he queries my database by himself, through the WCF service. I can't figure out how to implement this correctly.
So can you please help me to choose the correct way to implement this?
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