Data table displays are the workhorses of transaction- based Web
applications. So why are they so hard to build, especially since .NET
provides a built-in ASP.NET DataGrid control? The reason is that, like all
databound controls, data grid applications are not standard or necessarily
predictable. Building them is so hard precisely because they demand custom
treatment for each new application.
Consider the difficulty of fulfilling each of these pretty standard
requirements:
Complex displays: Very few enterprise-class applications use the simple
tabular displays that the default ASP.NET DataGrid control was designed to
support. Instead, most applications have complex display requirements,
resulting from filtered, multitable joins that require multiple data elements
to be... (more)