Summary
In this chapter, we examined how to improve the appearance of the DataGrid and DataList Web controls though the use of display properties. These properties can be applied at the table level, the row level, and the column level, allowing developers to create aesthetically pleasing DataGrids and DataLists without requiring extensive HTML and CSS markup.
Additionally, we saw how tools like Visual Studio .NET and the Web Matrix Project can be used to automatically provide style schemes. For those of us who are artistically challenged, the Auto Formatting features are a godsend.
This chapter concluded with an examination of customizing the data-binding output in templates. We saw how to supply dynamic data as parameters to built-in and custom functions, which could then tweak the data and produce customized output. The capability to provide custom functions to alter the data-bound output at runtime is a powerful technique that we will take advantage of many times throughout the remainder of this book.
This chapter concludes Part I. By this point, you should be comfortable using the data Web controls, binding a variety of types of data to the controls, and making the controls visually appealing. In Part II, we'll examine how to associate actions with the data Web controls!