Professional DevExpress™ ASP.NET Controls

Chapter 1. Programming with the ASPxGridView

This year is the tenth anniversary of my VB Today column for Codeguru.com and Developer.com. (My first article was published in PC World in 1992.) In that time, during which I've written hundreds of articles, readers have written to me more about two subjects than any other: keyboard hooking and grid controls.

Low-level keyboard hooks are cool. I started using them with DOS interrupts and C++ in the early 1990s. Grids of data, however, have the more practical and compelling everyday usefulness.

For years now, customers have asked me to make grids do things that they originally did not seem designed to do, including doing complex relationship modeling with grid nesting and performing real-time calculations with solutions that are more like Rube Goldberg machines than algorithms. Although crafting these solutions — sometimes against my better judgment — with nested user controls and hand-written asynchronous callbacks from scratch has been fun, I'm pleased to pass the baton off to the ASPxGridView.

The ASPxGridView is designed to support nesting, the power of Ajax callbacks, tuned performance for small and huge data sets, sorting, grouping, creating summaries, working with themes and skins, and much more. This chapter and the next chapter explore the ASPxGridView. I created the TotalFlight database for the samples used in these chapters because I wanted large amounts of data, but you can easily use Northwind or any other database that has ...