Summary

In this hour we examined the ASP.NET list Web controls: the DropDownList, CheckBoxList, and RadioButtonList. These three controls are composed of a series of list items that can be specified statically, programmatically, or through data binding. The manner by which these three controls differ is in how they render their list items. A DropDownList control renders as a drop-down list, with each item an option in the list. A CheckBoxList renders each of its items as a check box, and the RadioButtonList renders its items as radio buttons.

A common use of the list controls is to list a particular column from a database table, enabling a visitor to easily filter displayed results. We saw an example of this in the "Filtering Results Using the DropDownList" section. In our example, a DropDownList contained the various genres, while a GridView displayed only those books of the selected genre.

Next hour will be our last hour that focuses on working with data and databases in an ASP.NET page. We'll touch on a variety of common data-related tasks that will be of particular use in the final three hours, when we build a photo album web application from the ground up.