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Girish Gangadharan - Simply put

SUNDAY, JULY 24, 2005

Datagrid Vs Datalist Vs Repeater

One of the most popular questions in the .Net world is "What's the difference
between the Datagrid, the Datalist and the Repeater? And why would you choose
one over the others?"

Though this question has been answered in hundreds of blogs and articles online,
some of us still consider this to be a grey area and leave it mostly to the
developer's preference.

Well...here's what i understand about these web controls.

First of all, all the three controls were created with the same objective, which is
to display data. So why are there 3 different controls?

When these controls are bound to a datasource, for each entity in the datasource
an "item" is created and added to the collection of items for the control.

Each Webcontrol's "item" belongs to a different class. For example, a DatagridItem

class is derived from TableRow class. This is because the HTML rendered by a
datagrid is nothing but an HTML table with rows and columns based upon the
datasource it was bound to. Hence each item in a datagrid collection is nothing
but an HTML table row, when it is displayed in the browser.

One big advantage of the datagrid is that it is very simple to use and easily
customizable with some cool color settings for borders,backgrounds etc. It also
supports paging and sorting which also is accompanied by some customizable
features for example, the way the page index can be displayed, as numbers or
"previous and next" links etc.
So if you have a source of data that needs to be displayed with no customization or
no complex stuff, datagrid is the best choice.

But remember, you will have no control over the HTML table that is being
rendered.

Like the rows, each column in a DataGrid is an instance of a class that is derived
from the DataGridColumn class. There are five built-in DataGrid column types:

* BoundColumn
* ButtonColumn
* EditColumn
* HyperLinkColumn
* TemplateColumn

Besides these built-in data types we can also create our own customized DataGrid
column types by creating a class that derives from the DataGridColumn class.

Most of the newbies out there do not pay attention to the most important issue in
datagrids ; Viewstate. ViewState produced by the DataGrid can be humongous if it
contains a considerably large number of rows and thus be detrimental to
performance. Of course, you DO have the option to turn the viewstate off but then
that doesn't help you if you are planning to use sorting, paging and editing features
in the datagrid.

Apparently the datagrid has the worst performance of all the 3 web controls.

The Repeater Web control offers the most flexibility as far as control of the
rendered HTML is concerned. The datagrid and datalist controls place the content
within a HTML tag like <table> or <span> automatically. That's how they are
rendered. But a Repeater control renders ONLY what is specified by the developer.
For this reason, if you wish to display data in some way other than in an HTML
<table> tag or in a series of <span>tags, Repeater control is the best choice.
A Repeater is designed to let the user customize its output and thus have complete
control over what is being rendered. So understandably RepeaterItem class is not
derived from the TableRow class.

Just like in the DataList, with Repeater you specify the markup using templates.
The Repeater contains the following five templates:

* AlternatingItemTemplate
* FooterTemplate
* HeaderTemplate
* ItemTemplate
* SeparatorTemplate

An important thing to remember about the Repeater is that, it is not derived from
the WebControl class, like the DataGrid and DataList due to which it lacks the
stylistic properties common to both the DataGrid and DataList. So if you want to
make things look pretty in a repeater, write it yourself ;). But in most cases this is
what i want : Complete control over what is being rendered.(Yupp... i AM a control
freak!)

Among all the 3 web controls in question, Repeater offers the best performance,
though only slightly ahead of the datalist but beating datagrid by a considerable
margin.

Finally about the datalist.

The DataList does not use columns as in datagrid.It uses templates to display items
just like Repeaters. The advantage of using a template is that with a template,
you can specify both a mix of HTML content and databinding syntax.

Along with the ItemTemplate the DataList supports six other templates for a total
of seven:

* AlternatingItemTemplate
* EditItemTemplate
* FooterTemplate
* HeaderTemplate
* ItemTemplate
* SelectedItemTemplate
* SeparatorTemplate

By default, the DataList displays each item as an HTML tablerow. But an important
property of datalist is the RepeatColumns property. Using this property you can
specify how many DataList items should appear per table row. In addition to that,
you can also specify if you want the contents of the DataList should be displayed
using <span> tags instead of a <table> tags. This is done by setting the
RepeatLayout property, to either Table or Flow, which would render the data in
HTML <table> tags or in <span> tags.

With its templates and RepeatColumns and RepeatLayout properties, it's obvious
that the DataList allows for much more customization of the rendered HTML
markup than the DataGrid. Thus customization again, is the reason why one might
prefer to use a datalist over datagrid.

One major advantage of using Datagrid over datalist and repeater is, as already
mentioned, the sorting and paging functionality. While such functionality can be
implemented with some smart logic in the code, it's the question of how much
time and effort would be involved in doing it and whether the trade-off is worth it
in the application development process.

Guess ...that's about it. This is just an overall view, at a very high level.

For more information,

Read Scott Mitchell's article on the same topic

posted by Girish Gangadharan @ 7/24/2005 03:08:00 PM 8 comments

8 Comments:
At Wednesday, April 05, 2006 9:46:11 PM, Arthur Chaparyan said...

Great article! I personally try to limit my use of the DataGrid as much

as possible. It's incredibly slow and hard to work with. The DataList has
the distinct advantage of the RepeatDirection property, which makes
creating a photo album very quick and easy.

At Thursday, May 18, 2006 8:03:28 AM, Anonymous said...

Hi.. Nice one. Cleared a lot of questions out of my mind about using
these controls.
The URL for Scott Mitchell's article may need to be corrected.
Thanks.

At Tuesday, June 06, 2006 12:09:10 AM, Anonymous said...

Really Great article. It gives clear purpose of using of the control..

At Thursday, June 15, 2006 6:11:36 PM, Anonymous said...

 This article is looks pretty simple and covers all what is needed to know
about these controls.

At Saturday, June 17, 2006 3:59:25 PM, Anonymous said...

Nice Article. Thanks,

At Friday, June 30, 2006 1:37:07 AM, Anonymous said...

Hi, Good article really helpul in understanding these controls

At Friday, August 25, 2006 7:10:39 AM, Max said...

cheers for the article - seems I must be a control freak too - repeaters
all the way :D

At Saturday, September 23, 2006 3:55:43 AM, Kirti said...

 Thanks for describing in detail.

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