Chapter 11 Managing Views of a Record

Overview

Many applications need to work on a single record at a time. ASP.NET 1.x has no built-in support for this scenario. Creating a single record view is possible, but it requires some coding and, possibly, a custom control. You have to fetch the record, bind its fields to a data-bound form, and optionally provide paging buttons to navigate between records. Displaying the contents of a single record is a common and necessary practice when you build master/detail views. Typically, the user selects a master record from a list or a grid, and the application drills down to show all the available fields. In ASP.NET 2.0, the DetailsView control fulfills this role and is the ideal complement to the DataGrid and GridView controls that we examined in the previous chapter.

The DetailsView control deliberately doesn't support templates. The FormView control, which we'll also cover in this chapter, is a fully templated details-view control.