Controls Designed for Use with Databases

There are three Web server controls that are specifically designed to be used with data sources. We've already seen one of them at work—data grids. The other two are data lists and repeaters. Here's an overview of these three controls:

DataGrid— Creates a tabular display of an entire table or selected columns. You can auto-format this control. Data grids can support edit, update, and deletion operations as well as paged output, sorting, and single selection (see "Creating a Data Grid" in the Immediate Solutions in this chapter).
DataList— Creates a (non-tabular) list display that you can customize. Data lists have an auto-format option and support single selection of items. You can edit the contents if you display text boxes in the list (see "Creating a Data List" in the Immediate Solutions in this chapter).
Repeater— Creates simple, read-only output. In fact, repeaters only let you iterate over the records they're bound to; they have no default appearance at all. You're responsible for adding any HTML you want to use to display data (see "Creating Repeaters" in the Immediate Solutions in this chapter).

I'll take a look at these three controls in more detail now. You'll find them all used in code in the Immediate Solutions section of this chapter.