Programming Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 Core Reference

In ASP.NET 2.0, the developer's toolbox for data-binding operations is definitely richer and more complete than in ASP.NET 1.x. You not only have a new and radically revised grid control, but you also have two other controls to manage views of a single record. There's nothing like this in ASP.NET 1.x.

The DetailsView and FormView control are two sides of the same coin. Both offer a user interface for viewing the contents of a single record. In both cases, the user interface is largely customizable and associated with predefined data operations such as delete, update, and insert. Bound to a data source control, both DetailsView and FormView can manage an underlying data source effectively without forcing developers to write ad hoc code. (Well, this is not entirely true. If you expose your data source through a DAL as recommended for large systems you have to write that code at least.)

The key difference between DetailsView and FormView lies in the support for templates. The former is perhaps a richer control with good basic support for templates limited to individual fields, and it has a relatively rich set of styles and visual properties. If you want to create your own form to edit and insert records, you should use the FormView control. If you do so, though, forget about standard rendering a form view, in fact, is 100-percent templated and requires you to specify every single byte of markup.

With this chapter, we conclude the second part of the book the part devoted to data access and related tools. Starting with the next chapter, we'll begin a new trip in the ASP.NET infrastructure, one that shows you how to make pages and applications run.