Question

I have a SQL Server table full of training course progress. I want to make a report. The report is to be a list of users where each row shows their name, completion status, and percentages. They are to be able to expand each row to show sub-rows which elaborate with section by section detailed stats. What is the best UI control to use in ASP.NET to pair with my SQL data to display this in an easy to read manner?

Answer 1

Dave Ward has a really interesting post on creating a simple data repeater ASP.net page methods and jQuery to display data in a table format. Essentially you will use page methods to send data to the client and format it into a simple table using a micro-template.

As an alternative approach, you could format your data as a html table with the ASP.Net data repeater and use a jQuery plugin to add the paging functionality client side. You may to be careful with this approach, as with a high volume of data your html could become quite large and paging may become important to ensure a quick user experience.

That takes care of your table on the client. To add functionality to expand a row to display detail you can wrap that information in a div tag and attach a click event to show or hide the content.