13.1 Binding to the DataList and Repeater Controls

Chapter 10 showed the differences among the entirely "lookless" Repeater control and the somewhat more robust DataList control, as well as the DataGrid control that we have already examined in some detail. The table is reproduced here for your convenience as Table 13-1.

Table 13-1. Comparison of the Repeater, DataList, and DataGrid controls

Feature	Repeater	DataList	DataGrid
Table layout	No	No	Yes
Flow layout	Yes	Yes	No
Column layout	No	Yes	No
Style properties	No	Yes	Yes
Templates	Yes	Yes	Columns/ optional
Select/ Edit/Delete	No	Yes	Yes
Sort	No	No	Yes
Paging	No	No	Yes

You can see that the repeater and the data list do not automatically provide a table layout. In fact, you can use either control to display data horizontally or vertically, and the DataList control can provide automatic support for columns.

The key difference between the DataList and Repeater controls, on the one hand, and the DataGrid control, on the other, is that the first two use templates to determine their look and feel.