Which data control would be apt for the scenario? - asp.net

Question

Guys i have a job to display the list of subscribers as it is given in the image. I would like to know which data control in ASP.NET would be perfect for this scenario. I am just playing with Listview but i would like get inputs from the folks here. Thank You. Faraaz.
Update1: Should i use list of gridviews (nested inside a listview) here? Or can it be done with a single list view?

Answer 1

Obviously, grid-view would give you desired tabular layout (probably with the minimal efforts with Auto Generated Columns).
However, if paging, sorting, editing are note required then I would rather user Repeater control. The main reason being precise control over the mark-up. For example, grid-view does not support elements such as <colgroup> or <thead> (again, these elements may not be needed for your layout). If paging/sorting/editing etc is needed then ListView is better choice.
As far as, showing multiple tables goes, you can use nested controls - for example, repeater/list-view nesting a grid-view.
EDIT:
You are not very clear about the structure of data that you have and also about the exact layout that you want. So here's what I am assuming - you have a single List<Subscriber> containing both root subscribers and their children. And in the layout, you want one table for root subscribers followed by multiple tables - one for each root subscriber's children.
Mark-up will be something like
<asp:Repeater runat="server" ID="Outer" >
<HeaderTemplate>
<%-- Put a grid here for parent -->
<asp:GridView runat="server" ID="Root" DataSource='<%# GetRootSubscribers() %>' >
... column def etc
</asp:GridView>
</HeaderTemplate>
<ItemTemplate>
<!-- Put a grid here for children for current root subsriber -->
<asp:GridView runat="server" ID="Child" DataSource='<%# GetChildSubscribers(Eval("MemberID")) %>' >
... column def etc
</asp:GridView>
</ItemTemplate>
</asp:Repeater>
This will be supported by two code-behind methods such as
protected IEnumerable<Subscriber> GetRootSubscribers()
{
// I am not sure how you decide if a subscriber is a parent or not, I have just
// illustrated a condition where you have a parent id field to indicate the same
return allSubscribers.Where(s => s.ParentID == null);
}
protected IEnumerable<Subscriber> GetChildSubscribers(object memberId)
{
// I am not sure how you decide a child subscriber, I have just
// illustrated a condition where you have a parent id field to indicate the same
return allSubscribers.Where(s => s.ParentID.Equals(memberId));
}
// bind the outer repeater to root list
Outer.DataSource = GetRootSubscribers();
Outer.DataBind();
Hope this will give you some idea about how to proceed.

Answer 2

to me this is a GridView with usual header texts. The first bar above you can make with any other control or pure HTML right before the grid. ListViews are not grids and in my opinion should not be used when the final expected result is closer to a grid