Suggestions on which ASP.NET control to use?

Question

I've received a project for internal use. My application has to store about 100 rows of meta data of a game and each row has about 15 fields maximum. Fields can be game name, game category, maker, source code path, etc. I will most likely have to join about 5-10 tables for each row of record. Only a few people are using it and will receive very little hits. Speed performance is not a much of an issue. The rows of data I have to present must be sortable and searchable

My current solution is to use ASP.NET's GridView control with ASP.NET's AJAX UpdatePanel to give it that ajax feel. I'm thinking of using LINQ-to-SQL as my data access layer. I'm thinking of building my own custom search engine but if there's an existing control that has this feature already, i would prefer to use that; anyone know of such control exist? Anyways what do you guys think?

Update #1: I'm looking into creating a DynamicData website. Any have thoughts on that?

Answer 1

Gridview is your best bet. It's so powerful if you know how to use it correctly. It does automatic sorting and if you can code pretty well you can get the data to be filterable(if that's a word). It also makes the Connection to the database for you....so in my opinion, you can't beat the gridview when it comes to reports like that.

Answer 2

Use ext.js!

Look at the Grid Samples, its a very shallow learning curve and provides you with amazing results in little to no time.

http://extjs.com/products/extjs/

Basically, you expose your data via a web service (asmx or WCF, your choice), throw the Ext.Js grid onto your html/aspx page and point it at your webservice. Configure the control for things like sorting/searching/expanding/grouping/paging etc (use the api reference http://extjs.com/deploy/dev/docs/).

Answer 3

ASP.NET Dynamic Data looks really cool, particularly for sites where you've got:

• lots of data
• not a lot of worries about performance
• no / little desire to skin / design the site
• no / little desire to extend existing / write new functionality.

So I'd say that's a good match for your project.