Getting COUNT and SKIP TAKE in one operation with Linq to Entities

Question

I have a data call in a Linq to Entities powered data access layer that is designed to make paged calls.

In doing so, I need to select a subset of the data, say 50 r

Answer 1

It may be possible, but it probably won't be much faster because of the criteria you're using. Since you're searching for text within a column value, you cannot use an index and thus must do a table scan. You could do a single query to get all records and do the Count and Skip/Take in linq-to-objects:

var queryResult = DatabaseContext.Table
    .Where(x => !x.IsDeleted)
    .OrderBy(i => i.ID)
    .Where(p => (
            p.PropertyOne.ToLower().Contains(query) ||
            p.PropertyTwo.ToLower().Contains(query) 
            ))
    .ToList();

int count = queryResult.Count();  // now this will be a linq-to-objects query

var returnData = queryResult
    .Skip(start).Take((length))
    .AsEnumerable();

but you'd have to try it to see if it would be any faster.