ASP.NET DataList control - Working with DataList control in ASP.NET

This comes in handy, especially in situations where you have too many columns in your database table or columns with larger widths of data. As an example, imagine what would happen if there is a fi eld called Address in our Employee table having data of large size and you are displaying the data using a Repeater, a DataGrid, or a GridView control. You will not be able to display columns of such large data sizes with any of these controls as the display would look awkward. This is where the DataList control fits in.

In a sense, you can think the DataList control as a combination of the DataGrid and the Repeater controls. You can use templates with it much as you did with a Repeater control and you can also edit the records displayed in the control, much like the DataGrid control of ASP.NET. The next section compares the features of the three controls that we have mentioned so far, that is, the Repeater, the DataList, and the DataGrid control of ASP.NET.

When the web page is in execution with the data bound to it using the Page_Load event, the data in the DataList control is rendered as DataListItem objects, that is, each item displayed is actually a DataListItem. Similar to the Repeater control, the DataList control does not have Paging and Sorting functionalities built into it.

Using the DataList Control

To use this control, drag and drop the control in the design view of the web form onto a web form from the toolbox.

Refer to the following screenshot, which displays a DataList control on a web form:

The following list outlines the steps that you can follow to add a DataList control in a web page and make it working:

1. Drag and drop a DataList control in the web form from the toolbox.
2. Set the DataSourceID property of the control to the data source that you will use to bind data to the control, that is, 
     you can set this to an SQL Data Source control.
3. Open the .aspx fi le, declare the element and defi ne the fi elds as per your requirements.
4. Use data binding syntax through the Eval() method to display data in these defi ned fi elds of the control.

You can bind data to the DataList control in two different ways, that is, using the DataSourceID and the DataSource properties. You can use the inbuilt features like selecting and updating data when using the DataSourceID property. Note that you need to write custom code for selecting and updating data to any data source that implements the ICollection and IEnumerable data sources. We will discuss more on this later. The next section discusses how you can handle the events in the DataList control.

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