Efficient Data Paging with the ASP.NET 2.0 DataList Control and ObjectDataSource Options

[DEADmike]

Efficient Data Paging with the ASP.NET 2.0 DataList Control and ObjectDataSource
Last weekend I posted about how to implement super efficient data-paging using the new ROW_NUMBER() within SQL 2005 (which is supported with the free SQL Express edition and up) and the new ASP.NET 2.0 GridView/ObjectDataSource controls.



The BIG win with this approach is that it enables a web-application to efficiently retrieve only the specific rows it needs from the database, and avoid having to pull back dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of results to the web-server – only to then end up trimming them down to the 10-15 you end up displaying on a web-page (which is what most data-paging solutions do today). This can lead to significant performance wins within your application (both in terms of latency and throughput), and reduce the load on your database.



A few people have asked me to also provide a similar sample that demonstrates how to also implement efficient data-paging using an ASP.NET DataList or Repeater control instead (since neither of these have built-in paging UI semantics – but they do have the big benefit of allowing developers to have tight control over the html generated).



You can download a sample app that demonstrates how to-do this here.



For the scenario in the sample I basically “borrowed” the UI used on several popular ecommerce web-sites (although I tried to be a good CSS citizen, and implemented it using CSS rules instead of a table-heavy format):

Bron: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/200.../07/434787.aspx