Add guidance on retrieving TotalCount with paginated query

[adamal]

When paging queried data, we often need to know the totalt count of the filtered data before paging.
The straight-forward approach causes two roundtrips to the database. One for the data one for the count.

In Dapper, this is easily achievable using QueryMultiple.

On Stackoverflow I have only found very old or low quality answers, with solutions that are hacky at best. Chat-GPT provides broken answers. Would be great if you could provide an authoritative answer. This specific article on paging seems an ideal location.

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Document Details

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• ID: 14420c94-0cae-1648-b734-633a1cac6624
• Version Independent ID: 14420c94-0cae-1648-b734-633a1cac6624
• Content: Pagination - EF Core
• Content Source: entity-framework/core/querying/pagination.md
• Product: entity-framework
• Technology: entity-framework-core
• GitHub Login: @roji
• Microsoft Alias: avickers

[roji]

The main issue for batching multiple queries is dotnet/efcore#10879 that would be the analog to Dapper's QueryMultiple; unfortunately there isn't a great way to achieve that at the moment. It may be possible to fake it by folding the two queries into one, but I don't have an example ready (and it would probably mostly be a hack).