That's Not ASP! Today's lesson illustrates two of the greatest improvements of ASP.NET over classic ASP: the DataSet and data binding. The first is somewhat similar to the older Recordset object, but provides much more functionality. It can represent complete sets of data, including relationships between tables and hierarchical data sets. Data binding allows you to easily display content in your pages. In classic ASP, you had to manually loop through any data store, such as the Recordset shown in the following code snippet: <% Do While Not objRS.EOF Response.write "<B>" & objRS("FirstName") & " " & _ objRS("LastName") & "</B><BR>" & _ objRS("Address") & "<BR>" & objRS("City") & _ "<BR>" & objRS("State") &"<BR>"& objRS("Zip") & _ objRS("Phone") & "<P><HR><P>" objRS.Movenext Loop %> Developers had to build the code to handle the display as well as the HTML for it. Thus, code and UI elements were interspersed together throughout a page, which was prone to error and often led to confusion (this problem was known as spaghetti code). With data binding and server controls, that is no longer necessary. These controls will automatically loop through any object that can be iterated, such as a DataSet, array, or even other listing server controls! In addition, they provide a plethora of capabilities to control the display of the data. After you've experienced data binding and the listing server controls, you'll wonder how you ever got by without them! They can easily cut you development time in half, at the same time providing more functionality than with classic ASP. |