Professional DevExpress™ ASP.NET Controls

Chapter 2. Advanced ASPxGridView Computing

The one thing that I've learned from programming in multiple languages is that tools have one of the biggest impacts on productivity. My dad put it much more simply: "A craftsman is known by his tools."

A tool such as assembler that supports working with very small atoms of code requires a lot of effort to build up a toolset. On the other end of the spectrum, tools such as the ASPxGridView simply depend on you learning how to "turn" features on. Rather than roll your own search feature, use the built-in filter capabilities, for example. In this chapter, you continue your exploration of the ASPxGridView by reading about updating data, using collections as data sources, defining master-detail views, handling callback errors, exporting grid data, and much more.

The examples in this chapter continue using the TotalFlight database where it makes sense to do so; however, some sections, such as the section about grid templates ("Defining Template Regions"), use the Northwind database to demonstrate how to display images directly from a database.

Storing Changes

In Chapter 1, you explore some of the grid features related to reading data, including filtering, grouping, and using summary values, but reading data is only half of the picture. For applications, once a user gets the data they want, they often want to change it. The ASPxGridView supports using the grid to change the data and saving those changes back to the database.

The underlying operations ...