Customizing the DataGrid Pager Bar and the Paging Engine

Unique among the iterative list-bound ASP.NET controls, the DataGrid control provides full support for paging - the ability to display the data source rows in equally sized pages. More often than not, the size of a data source exceeds a typical page's real estate. Both for performance reasons and the user's ease of navigation, web pages tend to distribute a long response over different pages.

The DataGrid Web control provides a built-in and customizable infrastructure to automatically fill pages as users click on the pager bar. The standard paging functionality, though, is lacking some features that many real-world applications would need - for example, a friendlier user interface, the ability to jump directly to the first and last pages, and any visible feedback that indicates the current and following pages.

In this article, Dino Esposito delves deep into the paging engine of the DataGrid and discusses how to enhance the user interface, as well as the logic behind page creation.