Question

Wondering the best way to populate a GridView with my object data.

I have to show a product list from an complex object Sale, whose structure is something like this:

class Sale {
    int id;
    List<SaleItem> saleItems;
}

class SaleItem {
    int id;
    int quantity;
    Product product;

    BillingAddress billingAddress;
    ShippingAddress shippingAddress;
}

class Product {
    int id;
    string name;
    List<BuyingConfiguration> buyingConfigurations;
}

class BuyingConfiguration {
    string name; // like size, color, material
    string value;
}

and my grid should look like this:

Sale Items
+---------+---+------------+------------+----------------+
| Name    | # | B. Address | S. Address | Configurations |
+---------+---+------------+------------+----------------+
| Ferrari | 2 | --         | --         | Color: red     |
|         |   |            |            | Engine: Xyz    |
+---------+---+------------+------------+----------------+
| Jax     | 1 | --         | --         | Color: blue    |
|         |   |            |            | Engine: Abc    |
+---------+---+------------+------------+----------------+

Should I implement an ObjectDataSource for my Sale object? Is there any better solution?

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EDIT 2: Let me try to make myself clear: the problem is not how to the display configurations.
My problem is that the Sale object is returned to my code from the persistence layer, thats the why I dont want the GridView to access Database directly. Instead, it needs to load all its data from my Sale object, how to achieve that?

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EDIT:

The Grid markup as requested:

<asp:GridView runat="server" ID="GridProdutos" OnRowDataBound="GridProdutos_OnRowDataBound"
    AutoGenerateColumns="False">
    <Columns>
        <asp:BoundField HeaderText="Name" />
        <asp:BoundField HeaderText="#" />
        <asp:BoundField HeaderText="B. Address" />
        <asp:BoundField HeaderText="S. Address" />
        <asp:BoundField HeaderText="Configurations" />
    </Columns>
</asp:GridView>

---

Ugly solution so far, using OnRowDataBound (I want to avoid that!):

protected void GridProdutos_OnRowDataBound(object sender, GridViewRowEventArgs e) {
    if (e.Row.DataItem == null)
        return;

    SaleItem item = (SaleItem )e.Row.DataItem;

    e.Row.Cells[0].Text = item.product.name;
    e.Row.Cells[1].Text = item.quantity.ToString();

    StringBuilder sbConfigurations = new StringBuilder();

    foreach (BuyingConfiguration configurationItem in item.product.buyingConfigurations) {
        sbConfigurations.AppendFormat("{0}: {1}<br />", configurationItem.name, configurationItem.value);
    }
    e.Row.Cells[4].Text = sbConfigurations .ToString();
}

Answer 1

I would suggest using the TemplateColumns with binding expressions. You can bind your GridView to the saleItems list, and implement getter methods to render each field given a SaleItem instance. For example, your Name column could be defined as follows:

            <asp:TemplateField>
                <ItemTemplate>
                    <%# ((SaleItem)Container.DataItem).product.Name %>
                </ItemTemplate>
            </asp:TemplateField>

The same thing could be done with a custom getter method to move the access details into the code-behind:

            <asp:TemplateField>
                <ItemTemplate>
                    <%# getSaleItemProductName((SaleItem)Container.DataItem) %>
                </ItemTemplate>
            </asp:TemplateField>

Don’t forget to add an Import directive to be able to reference your types:

<%@ Import Namespace="YouNamespaceHere" %>