Why should you care?

ShopNest catalog has 200k SKUs — mobile clients need page 3 of twenty items, not entire table JSON.

See it live — copy this example

Paste into a .NET project with EF Core packages, then run with LocalDB/SQL Server (dotnet ef / dotnet run).

var page = 2;
var size = 20;

var products = await _context.Products
    .AsNoTracking()
    .Where(p => p.CategoryId == catId && p.IsPublished)
    .OrderBy(p => p.Id)
    .Skip(page * size)
    .Take(size)
    .Select(p => new ProductCardDto(p.Id, p.Name, p.Price))
    .ToListAsync();

var total = await _context.Products.CountAsync(p => p.CategoryId == catId && p.IsPublished);

What happened?

• Skip/Take translate to OFFSET/FETCH.
• OrderBy Id gives stable pages.
• Separate CountAsync for total pages — acceptable cost for UI pager.

Practice next

1. Always OrderBy before Skip/Take.
2. Return total count or hasNext flag in API response.
3. Consider keyset pagination (Where Id > lastId) for deep pages.
4. build cursor pagination: Where(p => p.Id > cursor).Take(size).
5. Return PageResult record with items, total, page, size.

Remember

Skip/Take for offset pagination. Stable sort mandatory. Keyset pagination for very large offsets.

ShopNest infinite scroll

Mobile app loads product pages of 20 with total count for scroll indicator.

Outcome: Smooth browsing without multi-megabyte responses.