ASP.NET 4 Unleashed

Using Fields with the GridView Control

In all the sample code in the previous section, the GridView control was used to render automatically an HTML table that contains a list of data items. However, there is a problem with allowing GridView to render its columns automatically. The result does not look professional.

For example, the column headers are simply the names of the underlying database columns. Displaying the column name EntryDate as a column header seems, well, a little cheesy. We really need to specify custom column headers.

Another problem with enabling GridView to render its columns automatically is that you give up any control over column formatting. For example, the BoxOfficeTotals column displays as a decimal amount without ...