What is the difference between data grid, data list and repeater ?

This article discusses the difference between data grid, data list and repeater.

A data grid, datalist and repeater are all ASP.NET data web controls. They have many things in common like data source propert, data blind method ItemDataBound and item created.

When you assign the data source property of a data grid to a dataset then each data row present in the data tow collection of data table is assigned to a corresponding DataGridItem and this is same for the rest of the two controls. However, the HTML code generated for a data grid has an HTML table element created for the particular Data Row and it is a Table form representation with column and rows.

For a datalist it is an array of rows and based on the template selected and the repeat column property value we can specify how many data source records should appear per HTML

row. In short, in the data grid we have one record per row, but in data list, we can have five or six rows per row.

For a repeater control, the data records to be displayed depend upon the templeates specified and the only HTML generated in the due to the templates.

In addition to these, Data grid has a in-built support for sort, filter adn paging the data which is one possible when using a data list and for a repeater controlk we would require to write an explicit code to do paging.