Pagination

By default, the number of returned documents is limited to 10,000 for a single search, which is the normal behavior for many search engines. Using pagination ("skip and take"), you can display a maximum of 10 pages, with a maximum of 1,000 documents per page by default.

Similar to LINQ, the Optimizely Search & Navigation .NET API has Skip and Take methods to bypass (Skip) the number of search results, and specify how many search results should be returned (Take).

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Note

You cannot combine Skip and Take to retrieve more than 10,000 hits in a single search. For performance reasons, Optimizely Search & Navigation is not intended for retrieving all content from the database in real-time, with deep pagination.

The maximum value that can be specified using the Take method is 1,000. In other words, Take(1001) or Take(int.MaxValue) throws an exception. If more than a thousand result items are needed, use multiple search requests.

The following example uses the Skip and Take methods for pagination.

string searchQuery = //From query string or similar
int page = //From query string or similar
int pageSize = 15;

client.Search<BlogPost>()
    .For(searchQuery)
    .Skip((page - 1)*pageSize)
    .Take(pageSize)
    .GetResult();

Sometimes visitors get duplicate hits on pagination because different shards are answering the same query. To make sure this does not happen, use the UsePreference method. By default, the UsePreference method does not use the PrimaryFirst option, so in rare cases visitors may still get duplicate hits. (although it has better performance). Using the UsePreference method with the PrimaryFirst option prevents duplicate hits completely, but sometimes the query can be slower than usual.

The following example uses UsePreference method for pagination.

string searchQuery = //From query string or similar
int page = //From query string or similar
int pageSize = 15;

client.Search<BlogPost>()
    .UsePreference()
    .For(searchQuery)
    .Skip((page - 1)*pageSize)
    .Take(pageSize)
    .GetResult();