This article has been
excerpted from book "A Programmer's Guide to ADO.NET in C#".
Web Forms provides many controls that support data binding. You can connect
these controls to ADO.NET components such as a DataView, DataSet, or a
DataViewManager at design-time as well as at run-time. Data binding in Web Forms
works in the same way as it does in the Windows Forms with a few exceptions. For
example, to bind a dataset to a DataGrid, you call the DataBind method of the
DataGrid control. I'll discuss all this in a moment. First let's see some basics
of data-bound controls.
In this section I'll discuss data binding and how it works in ASP.NET
Data-Bound Controls
ASP.NET provides a rich set of data-bound server controls. These controls are
easy to use and provide a Rapid Application Development (RAD) Web development.
You can categorize these controls in two groups: single-item data-bound control
and multi-item data-bound controls.
You use the single-item data-bound controls to display the value of a single
item of a database table. These controls don't provide direct binding with the
data source. The highlighted part of table 7-20 shows an item of a database
table. You use the Text, Caption, or Value property of these controls to show
the data a field.
Mahesh |
234, G. Road |
12398 |
Mike |
5443, NY |
89433 |
AJ |
P. Rd |
54323 |
Table 7-20. An item
Examples of single-item data-bound controls are textboxes, buttons, labels,
images, and so on.
You use the multi-item data bound controls to display the entire or a partial
table. These controls provide direct binding to the data source. You use the
DataSource property of these controls to bind a database table to these controls
(see table 7-21).
Mahesh |
234, G. Road |
12398 |
Mike |
5443, NY |
89433 |
AJ |
P. Rd |
54323 |
Table 7-21. Multiple-item controls
Some examples of multi-item data-bound controls are DataGrid, ListBox,
DataList, DropDownList, and so on. Figure 7-22 shows some of the data bound
controls.
Figure 7-22. Data-bound control
In ASP.NET, you create these controls using a <asp:controlName> tag. Table 7-4
describes some common data-bound server-side controls.
Table 7-4 ASP .NET Data-Bound Controls
CONTROL |
ASP.NET CODE |
DESCRIPTION |
DataGrid |
<asp:DataGrid> |
Display a database
(through ADO .NET) in a scrollable grid format and supports selection,
adding, updating, sorting, and paging |
DataList |
<asp:DataList> |
Displays data in
templates and style format |
ListBox |
<asp:ListBox> |
Displays list box,
which can be associated to ADO.NET data field to display data in a list
format |
DropDownList |
<asp:DropDownList> |
Displays
DropDownList control, which can be used to display ADO.NET data source
data in a drop down combo box format |
CheckBox |
<asp:CheckBox > |
Display single
check box, which can be connected to an item of the ADO.NET data source |
CheckBoxList |
<asp:CheckBoxList> |
Display list of
check boxes that can be connection to the to the ADO.NET data source |
Repeater |
<asp:Repeater> |
Displays a
templated data-bound list |
TextBox |
<asp:TextBox> |
Displays a text
box, which can be used to display ADO.NET using its Text property |
Conclusion
Hope this article would have helped you in understanding Data Binding in ASP
.NET. See other articles on
the website also for further reference.
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