Working with Data in ASP.NET 2.0 - Efficiently Paging Through Large Amounts of Data
As we discussed in the preceding tutorial, paging can be implemented in one of two ways:
- Default Paging – can be implemented by simply checking the Enable Paging option in the data Web control’’s smart tag? however, whenever viewing a page of data, the ObjectDataSource retrieves all of the records, even though only a subset of them are displayed in the page
- Custom Paging – improves the performance of default paging by retrieving only those records from the database that need to be displayed for the particular page of data requested by the user? however, custom paging involves a bit more effort to implement than default paging
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Working with Data in ASP.NET 2.0 Displaying Data with the DataList and Repeater Controls
In all of the examples throughout the past 28 tutorials, if we needed to display multiple records from a data source we turned to the GridView control. The GridView renders a row for each record in the data source, displaying the record’s data fields in columns. While the GridView makes it a snap to display, page through, sort, edit, and delete data, its appearance is a bit boxy. Moreover, the markup responsible for the GridView’s structure is fixed - it includes an HTML with a table row () for each record and a table cell () for each field. To provide a greater degree of customization in the appearance and rendered markup when displaying multiple records, ASP.NET 2.0 offers the DataList and Repeater controls (both of which were also available in ASP.NET version 1.x). The DataList and Repeater controls render their content using templates rather than BoundFields, CheckBoxFields, ButtonFields, and so on. Like the GridView, the DataList renders as an HTML , but allows for multiple data source records to be displayed per table row. The Repeater, on the other hand, renders no additional markup than what you explicitly specify, and is an ideal candidate when you need precise control over the markup emitted.
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