The ASP.NET 2.0 platform provides an entirely new approach to data binding. This approach eliminates the coding necessary for connecting a control to its underlying data source. Telerik r.a.d.panelbar employs this new way of accessing data, so that its data binding can be accomplished in a completely declarative manner using the new data source controls.
Declarative data source controls expose data from a back-end store (SQL database, middle-tier business object, XML file, XML Web Service) to a data-bound UI control on a page. Data source controls also provide new capabilities such as sorting, paging, caching, updating, inserting, and deleting data. UI controls can automatically use these features without any additional code.
Data Source Controls
Data source controls are not rendered, but instead represent a particular back-end data store. ASP.NET 2.0 includes the following server controls out-of-the-box: SqlDataSource, ObjectDataSource, AccessDataSource, SiteMapSource, XmlDataSource.
Currently Telerik RadPanelBar supports the following data source controls:
- SqlDataSource
The SqlDataSource control enables you to use a Web control to access data located in a relational data base, including Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases, as well as OLE DB and ODBC data sources.
- ObjectDataSource
The ObjectDataSource is an ASP.NET data source control that represents a data-aware middle-tier object or a data-interface object to data-bound controls. You can use the ObjectDataSource control in conjunction with a data-bound control to display, edit, and sort data on a Web page with little or no code.
- AccessDataSource
The AccessDataSource control is works with Microsoft Access databases. Like its base class, SqlDataSource, the AccessDataSource control uses SQL queries to perform data retrieval. To learn how to bind a panelbar to an AccessDataSource control, refer to the AccessDataSource topic of this manual.
- SiteMapSource - enables binding to the hierarchy exposed by an ASP.NET 2.0 site navigation provider.
The SiteMapDataSource control is associated to a data-bound control through the control's DataSourceID property. For general information on site navigation in ASP.NET, refer to the SiteMaps topic of this manual.
- XmlDataSource - enables binding to an XML file or document.
XmlDataSource supports a DataFile property for specifying the path to an XML data file to be used as input. You may also specify a TranformFile property to apply an XSLT transformation to the data and an XPath property for specifying a subset of nodes to expose from the data source.
Choosing the DataSource control
To enable data binding, you can use the property grid in Visual Studio 2005, as shown in the capture below:
See Also