ASP.NET Grid View vs. List View

Question

What are the advantages of using listview over gridview? I need pagination, editing rows, inserting rows, and deleting rows in my view. Which control is best for that? It seems like GridView does not support data pager. What would I sacrifice if I migrated my gridviews to listviews?

Answer 1

GridView supports:

• sorting by click
• paging
• editing
• selection
• template-based layout (rendered within <table>)

ListView supports:

• List item
• paging (need to use DataPager)
• editing
• selection
• sorting by click (need to create an event handler manually)
• template-based layout (rendered as you want it + provides more templates, e.g. - GroupTemplate)

The reason to use ListView would be if you need some special layout, for example, to create a table that places more than one item in the same row, or to break free from table-based rendering altogether) - which is not possible with GridView.

Using GridView on the other hand is easier and faster, so unless you need special layout to display your data, use GridView.

Answer 2

This article is particularly useful for a comparison.

For me it is the raw flexibility of the HTML you can render. In a project I was developing I was using a GridView but replaced with the ListView as I wanted very specific paging requirements that couldn't be provided by the GridView. I could have used a 3rd party gridview to provide the paging requirements, but I wanted to minimise the reliance of 3rd party code.

The ListView alone in my opinion is a good reason for moving from ASP.NET 2.0 to 3.5.