Coding Journal

If you start going through examples using Silverlight 3 and RIA Services you'll encounter a settle issue with the paging functionality. It took me a while to realize why it wasn't working until I experimented with the Domain Service and found some posts on the issue. Paging requires your data layer to accept Skip() and Take(). Now most examples use the Entity Framework for the Data Layer and EF only allows Skip() and Take() when your data has some ordering. If you create your data layer using EF then add RIA services and configure paging on the Silverlight side you'll see that the first batch of rows will load fine but when you click on the next button there is no data. The solution is simple just add an OrderBy clause to the IQueryable property in your Domain Service that gets all the data from the table you want to enable paging on.

public class NorthwindDomainService : LinqToEntitiesDomainService
    {
    ...
        public IQueryable GetEmployees()
        {
            return this.Context.Employees
                .OrderBy(emp=>emp.EmployeeID);
        }

silverlight 3 paging ria services