Databinding in ASP .net

Rick Strahl understands what he’s doing, and shares his expertise in this older article. He has some interesting suggestions: ”

What’s wrong with Data Binding in ASP. Net?

Unfortunately, I personally think that data binding in ASP.Net doesn’t go nearly far enough. First the process of assigning data sources is cumbersome at best using either a slow and work extensive designer or alternately by having to embed yet another script based markup tag (<%# %>) into source code. Both are way too cumbersome if you’re dealing with a lot of data on a regular basis.

But more importantly data binding in ASP.Net is one way only. You can only bind data to data but there’s no mechanism to unbind the data from the control back into its underlying datasource. It’s hard to really call ASP.Net’s mechanism data binding because really what it is is a data display mechanism.

To clarify though, there are really two types of data binding in ASP.Net. There’s list based data binding of the type that you use to bind data to a ListBox or a DataGrid. This mechanism actually works very well and provides a good amount of flexibility. This is also primarily a display mechanism – you tend to display data or lists with this type of binding.

Then there is simple Control Data binding which basically binds to a single value to a property of a control. A text box binding to a field of the database is an example of simple data binding. This also tends to be the most common data binding that most people do during data entry and the one that is the most time consuming. And here is where the problem lies – the control binding here is one way and involves some convoluted syntax that isn’t even property based.”

Read the full article hosted by West Wind Technologies.