Learn about Different Types of Control with ASP.NET Data Control Tab

So, the next step we have is the data tab. These controls in the data tab are designed to help you display large amounts of data to the user. So for example, the GridView control displays data in the table and it is quite easy to use. We will have to look at that a bit later in this series. Data list, as it name suggest displays data in a list. DetailsView displays information for a single record. So typically what it have, a DataGrid, a GridView to display a set of records and then when the user clicks on or double clicks on one of those records, you have searched to another page and that page would contain a DetailsView to display all the details for the record that users actually selected.
Okay, FormView. The FormView control displays the values for a data record and it enables you to use user defined templates. You can specify quite specifically how you want all the values that bits of information to be laid out and likewise we have to repeat the control. To repeat, that is a container that lets you create custom lists on the webpage. So, we are going to have to look at this various different ways of displaying data coming up later on in the series. But you can see as well as the visible controls, we have a selection of non visible controls called data sources. So first of all, we have SqlDataSource. SqlDataSource lets you bind a webpage to a relation of data base such as SQL server or Oracle or DB2 or whatever. It encapsulates the data returned from a query on that database.
If you are trying to get data from a Microsoft Access database, then you will want to use one of these, the access that the source represents data from Microsoft Access. Okay, then we have the ObjectDataSource. ObjectDataSource lets you bind a web control to a custom class that you like yourself in the web application. This is quite of realistic requirement often rather than buying data controllers directly to a database. One thing you want to do is to write some code in the middle tier and the code will have various methods. Each of those methods for example might invoke a stored procedure. What you can do is you can bind your visible data controllers to one of those methods such that the method will be executed. It returns the side of data and that data will be bound to a webpage and display it to the user. So, we will see how to do that later as well.
Okay, next step, XmlDataSource. Well, XmlDataSource lets you bind to xml data as you probably guessed. This is useful, if you want to create hierarchical menus on the webpage, for example. And then we have SiteMapDataSource, SiteMapDataSource represents data for a site map. The site map lets users navigate around the various pages in the website. And then finally, we have Report Viewer. Report Viewer lets you view reports from Sequel server reporting services. We will not be covering report viewer in the series. Okay, so let us close the data tab and take a quick look at some of the others.