ASP.NET 2.0 Cookbook, 2nd Edition

2.2. Generating a Quick-and-Dirty Tabular Display

Problem

You want to display data from a database in a table, and you’re not overly concerned about performance or your ability to control the arrangement of the data items within the display.

Solution

Use a GridView control and bind the data to it.

In the .aspx file, add the GridView control responsible for displaying the data.

In the code-behind class for the page, use the .NET language of your choice to:

1. Create a SqlDataSource.

2. Set the ConnectionString, DataSourceMode, ProviderName, and SelectCommand properties of the SqlDataSource.

3. Assign the data source to the GridView control and bind it.

Figure 2-1 shows the appearance of a typical GridView in a browser. Examples 2-1 through 2-3 show the .aspx and VB and C# code-behind files for the application that produces this result.

Figure 2-1. Quick-and-dirty GridView output

Discussion

Implementing a simple GridView requires little coding. You must first add a GridView control to the .aspx file for your application and set a few of its attributes, as shown in Example 2-1. The GridView control has many attributes you can use to control the creation of a GridView object, but only three are required for this example: the id, runat, and AutoGenerateColumns attributes. The id and runat attributes are required by all server controls. When the AutoGenerateColumns attribute is set to True, it causes the