Limit serverside results from WebApi controller and ODATA w/ Nhibernate

Question

I've created a WebApi project in VS 2012, using NHibernate as my ORM and I intend to enable Odata support on it. So I've created a test controller with a single Get method that returns a list of entities from a table on my database.

Everything works fine, I can use OData to filter and order my results, etc. The problem is I couldn't find a way to limit the amount of data that's being returned from the database to the controller, and this table has millions of records in it.

Using the PageSize property of the Queryable attribute only seems to be limiting the amount of data returned to the client, but no the amount of Data returned from the DB.

I've tried applying a Take(n) on the IQueryable inside the get method before returning it, and it limits the results brought back from the DB, but it breaks the OData filtering, since if you try to query an entity that's not in the first n results, it just returns an empty collection.

I know you can use the $Top parameter on OData to accomplish this, but I would like not to depend on the client/consumer providing it in order to ensure that I'm not unnecessarily bringing thousands or even million of records that I'm not going to use.

I've also tried to manually check if the client provided a Top parameter on the query string, apply the OData transformation to my Queryable and then applying the Take(n) method over the transformed query. This approach enabled me to filter for any entity through OData, but it breaks pagination, because if I use the $Skip=n parameter, it again returns an empty collection.

So, is there any way to reliably limit the results fetched from the DB while not breaking the OData support?

Answer 1

We recently found that too. We are not applying a Take(pageSize) when server driven paging is enabled as we have to figure out if a next page link should be generated or not. We just enumerate the result set for pageSize number of entities and check if there are more entities or not. We thought that most providers generally bring a partial set of results as IQueryable is generally a lazy implementation. Turns out that is not true. Also, the database can optimize the query if it knows only pageSize number of results are required.

This is the issue that was opened for it. Good news is Youssef fixed it already :). This is the commit that fixed it. So, if you grab the nightly builds you should be good.