ASP.NET in a Nutshell

Data Binding

Although Examples 7-1 and 7-2 are written in different languages and use different techniques for retrieving data, they both write out the rendering code for formatting the data manually. In simple examples like these, this does not seem too burdensome. When doing more complex rendering, though, it can become quite involved and produce code that is difficult to maintain.

When working with data in a rich client application, the solution has been to use data-bound controls to display data, allowing the controls to take care of the rendering of each row of data based on control properties set by the developer. Microsoft introduced a similar idea for web development by adding client-side data-binding features to Internet Explorer. However, these features were only useful when you could be certain that all of your clients were using Internet Explorer, and in some cases, their use entailed expensive marshalling of data to the client.

ASP.NET introduces a new server-side data binding feature that addresses these issues. Data binding to server controls in ASP.NET can significantly reduce the amount of code that needs to be written and maintained for displaying data. In addition, since all data binding occurs on the server side and only HTML is returned to the client, server-side data binding provides great cross-browser compatibility.

You can perform data binding against properties for single-value binding or against data sources that contain multiple rows, such as collections, ...