Nesting a GridView within Repeater

Question

I have a scenario wherein, for example, I need to repeat a list of US states and display a table of cities and city populations after the name of each state. The design requirement dictates that every outer repetition must be the name of a state followed by a table of cities, and that requirement cannot be changed at this time. Are there disadvantages to nesting a GridView within a Repeater and then binding each repeated GridView during the Repeater's ItemDataBound event? What are some alternative solutions?

Answer 1

The best solution I was able to come up with was to nest the GridView in the Repeater. Then I bound each repeated GridView during the Repeater's ItemDataBound event. I turned off their ViewStates, of course, as they weren't required.

Answer 2

If it were me, I'd reverse the question and ask why I should use a GridView, If you need a bunch of built-in features like paging and sorting, then the GridView might be a good fit. If you just want tabular data, I'd reconsider. Why? Because with GridView you're getting a whole bunch of stuff you won't use, your ViewState will be potentially huge, and your page performance will be slower.

I'm not a bigot when it comes to GridView, but I only use them when there is a damn good reason.

Answer 3

In your above scenario, you'd be better off doing a master-detail style GridView, which will save you the overhead of all those GridView objects that get created.

There are various implementation of it (using a drop down for the master, using a modal popup for the detail, etc.), but the main point is that there are implementations available.

Answer 4

At the very least, hopefully you can turn off ViewState on the GridViews.