- Posted by justin on February 21, 2007
from: http://aspnet.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/012407-1.aspx
| A Multipart Series on ASP.NET 2.0's Data Source Controls |
ASP.NET 2.0 introduced a number of new Web controls designed for accessing and modifying data. These controls allow page developers to declaratively access and modify data without writing any code to perform the data access. This article is one in a series of articles on ASP.NET 2.0's new data source controls.
Data Source Control Basics - explores the concepts and advantages of data source controls, and compares their usage in ASP.NET 2.0 to data access techniques in ASP.NET 1.x.
Accessing Database Data - shows how to use the SqlDataSource and AccessDataSource controls to query data from a relational database.
Filtering Database Data with Parameters - learn how to retrieve just a subset of database data based on hard-coded values and values from the querystring, other Web controls on the page, session variables, and so on.
Retrieving XML Data with XmlDataSource Control - see how to retrieve both remote and local XML data and display it in a data Web control.
Creating Custom Parameter Controls - learn how to create your own custom, declarative Parameter controls for use in the data source controls' parameters collections.
Examining the Data Source Control's Events - explore the events raised during a data source control's lifecycle.
Declaratively Caching Data - learn how to cache data to the data cache simply by setting a couple of data source control properties.
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The ASP.NET 2.0 data source controls provide a declarative means for accessing and working with data. Simply set a few properties of the data source control, bind it to a data Web control, and, voila, data is being retrieved and displayed without having written a single line of code!
In addition to working with data declaratively, the data source controls can also cache data declaratively. Caching is a common technique used in data-driven applications to boost performance, and works by storing database data in memory where it can be more efficiently accessed. ASP.NET provides the data cache, which is a programmatically-accessible cache that is commonly used to store database results. See Caching in ASP.NET for more details on using the data cache and other caching options in ASP.NET.
What's worth noting about the data source controls is that they offer declarative access to the data cache. By simply setting a few properties, the data source controls will happily store their retrieved data in the data cache. Then, the next time the data source is asked to retrieve data, they'll pull that data from the cache instead of returning to the database. In this article we'll explore how to setup a data source control so that it stores it caches its results. Read on to learn more!
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