The Difference Between a DataGrid and a GridView in ASP.NET?

Question

I've been doing ASP.NET development for a little while now, and I've used both the GridView and the DataGrid controls before for various things, but I never could find a really good reason to use one or the other. I'd like to know:

What is the difference between these 2 ASP.NET controls? What are the advantages or disadvantages of both? Is one any faster? Newer? Easier to maintain?

The intellisense summary for the controls doesn't seem to describe any difference between the two. They both can view, edit, and sort data and automatically generate columns at runtime.

Edit: Visual Studio 2008 no longer lists DataGrid as an available control in the toolbox. It is still available (for legacy support I assume) if you type it in by hand though.

Answer 1

DataGrid was an ASP.NET 1.1 control, still supported. GridView arrived in 2.0, made certain tasks simpler added different databinding features:

This link has a comparison of DataGrid and GridView features -

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/05yye6k9(v=vs.100).aspx

Answer 2

The GridView control is the successor to the DataGrid control. Like the DataGrid control, the GridView control was designed to display data in an HTML table. When bound to a data source, the DataGrid and GridView controls each display a row from a DataSource as a row in an output table.

Both the DataGrid and GridView controls are derived from the WebControl class. Although it has a similar object model to that of the DataGrid control, the GridView control also has a number of new features and advantages over the DataGrid control, which include:

• Richer design-time capabilities.
• Improved data source binding capabilities.
• Automatic handling of sorting, paging, updates, and deletes.
• Additional column types and design-time column operations.
• A Customized pager user interface (UI) with the PagerTemplate property.

Differences between the GridView control and the DataGrid control include:

• Different custom-paging support.
• Different event models.

Sorting, paging, and in-place editing of data requires additional coding when using the DataGrid control. The GridView control enables you to add sorting, paging, and editing capabilities without writing any code. Instead, you can automate these tasks, along with other common tasks such as data binding to a data source, by setting properties on the control.

Answer 3

The DataGrid was originally in .NET 1.0. The GridView was introduced (and replaced the DataGrid) in .NET 2.0. They provide nearly identical functionality.