The method 'OrderBy' must be called before the method 'Skip' Exception

Question

I was trying to implement the jQgrid using MvcjQgrid and i got this exception.

System.NotSupportedException was unhandled by user code         


        

Answer 1

The exception means that you always need a sorted input if you apply Skip, also in the case that the user doesn't click on a column to sort by. I could imagine that no sort column is specified when you open the grid view for the first time before the user can even click on a column header. To catch this case I would suggest to define some default sorting that you want when no other sorting criterion is given, for example:

switch (sortColumn)
{
    case "JobDescriptionID":
        return (sortOrder == "desc")
            ? jobdescriptions.OrderByDescending(j => j.JobDescriptionID)
            : jobdescriptions.OrderBy(j => j.JobDescriptionID);

    case "JobDescriptionTitle":
        return (sortOrder == "desc")
            ? jobdescriptions.OrderByDescending(j => j.JobDescriptionTitle)
            : jobdescriptions.OrderBy(j => j.JobDescriptionTitle);

    // etc.

    default:
        return jobdescriptions.OrderBy(j => j.JobDescriptionID);
}

Edit

About your follow-up problems according to your comment: You cannot use ToString() in a LINQ to Entities query. And the next problem would be that you cannot create a string array in a query. I would suggest to load the data from the DB with their native types and then convert afterwards to strings (and to the string array) in memory:

rows = (from j in jobdescription
        select new
        {
            JobDescriptionID = j.JobDescriptionID,
            JobTitle = j.JobTitle,
            JobTypeName = j.JobType.JobTypeName,
            JobPriorityName = j.JobPriority.JobPriorityName,
            Rate = j.JobType.Rate,
            CreationDate = j.CreationDate,
            JobDeadline = j.JobDeadline
        })
        .AsEnumerable() // DB query runs here, the rest is in memory
        .Select(a => new
        {
            id = a.JobDescriptionID,
            cell = new[] 
            { 
                a.JobDescriptionID.ToString(), 
                a.JobTitle,
                a.JobTypeName,
                a.JobPriorityName,
                a.Rate.ToString(),
                a.CreationDate.ToShortDateString(),
                a.JobDeadline.ToShortDateString()
            }
        })
        .ToArray()

Answer 2

I had the same type of problem after sorting using some code from Adam Anderson that accepted a generic sort string in OrderBy.

After getting this excpetion, i did lots of research and found that very clever fix:

var query = SelectOrders(companyNo, sortExpression);

return Queryable.Skip(query, iStartRow).Take(iPageSize).ToList();

Hope that helps !

SP