Paging & Sorting grids with ASP.Net MVC

Question

I'm new to MVC, and am not following how you'd do paging and sorting on a grid. I'm used to using the asp.Net GridView control with an ObjectDataSource pointed at objects in our business layer - and in that case the ODS handles all of the paging & sorting using the methods that our ORM generates on the objects.

I've looked at using the same ORM with MVC - and things work out fine there - i just loop thru the collections to build the table on the page - but without the ODS to handle the paging & sorting, i'm confused as to how I'd handle that. Would I have a separate controller for the paging and sorting?

I understand that I need to roll my own - but where do I start? I've created a CustomerController, and a view that displays a table of customers that looks like below - and I want to sort on FirstName or LastName columns. My Model has a Sort() method on it that'll take a string sort expression in the format that would be used by a GridView/ODS pair. Would I create a new Action on my CustomerController called Sort, and put an ActionLink in my header?

    <table>
    <tr>
        <th>
            First Name
        </th>
        <th>
            Last Name
        </th>
    </tr>
    <% foreach (var item in Model)
       { %>
    <tr>
        <td>
            <%= Html.Encode(item.FirstName) %>
        </td>
        <td>
            <%= Html.Encode(item.LastName) %>
        </td>
    </tr>
    <% } %>
</table>

Answer 1

Your can use the same controller, just add an additional parameter and name it sort. Then check in the controller what value sort has, and sort your data based on that parameter.

Or if you want to do things on the client side, you can use something like tablesorter, a plugin for jquery.