Introduction to ASP.NET 2.0 SqlDataSource Control
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The SqlDataSource control is one of the new controls introduced in ASP.NET 2.0. It provides developers with a declarative way of accessing data in databases for code-free retrieving and updating operations. In this article, and the next few articles, we take a deep look at the SqlDataSource control and how it works.
We will use T-SQL statements to select, insert, update and delete data from tables. We will also use stored procedures with the SqlDataSource control and we will handle OUTPUT parameters and return values along the way. At first, we need to understand how to programmatically add the SqlDataSource control to a web form. Let's begin.
As you might know, to create database-aware applications your application needs a connection object, a command object, a data reader and maybe a dataset object. In ASP.NET 2.0 the Data Source Web Controls provide us with a declarative way of accessing data in databases. There are five Data Source Web Controls in ASP.NET 2.0, namely the SqlDataSource, AccessDataSource, ObjectDataSource, XmlDataSource and the SiteMapDataSource.
In this article we discuss the SqlDataSource, which provides access to any database as long as there is a data provider, registered in the machine.config file, for it. It makes sense because the SqlDataSource control uses "ADO.NET generic data access code" to access databases. If you don't know what a data provider is, simply understand that a data provider consists of classes that are specifically designed to access certain types of data stores for performing data operations on this data. If you don't know much about ADO.NET then please consult my articles about ADO.NET with ASP.NET 2.0.
The SqlDataSource control gives you an almost code-free mechanism for accessing a database. You use declarative programming to write markup for the control; you create the control (declaratively) and tell it where to get the data and what T-SQL statements or stored procedures will be used. You do all that without writing a single line of code!
Note that the SqlDataSource Control only gets you the data. You need a way to represent the data on the web form. That's where the Data-Bound Controls come into play. We will not discuss these controls in this article, because I want to discuss them in great detail, but we will use the GridView control to display the data we get from the database. The GridView control represents the data in a table-like format. Let's take our first example; it accesses the Northwind database and retrieves data from it.
Next: Accessing the Northwind database using SqlDataSource >>
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