grid controls for ASP.NET MVC ?

Question

If you are using ASP.NET MVC how are you doing grid display? Rolled your own? Got a library from somewhere?

These are some of the known grid display solutions I have found for ASP.NET MVC

• ASP.NET MVC Flexgrid - Has nice column layout method
• Code based ASP.NET MVC GridView - simple, small, clean
• MVC Contrib - grid from codePlex
• jQueryGrid - jQuery grid
• Datatables - jQuery plugin - believed to be section 508 compliant
• extJS - cross browser RIA framework - has grid support
• Ingrid - jQuery data grid
• Terlerik MVC - jQuery based grid that is GPL v2 licensed, commercial version also available
• MVC Controls Toolkit - Client Site Based Grid

If you know of anything else that you are using or know to be good, please let me know.

Answer 1

If it's just for viewing data, I use simple foreach or even aspRepeater. For editing I build specialized views and actions. Didn't like webforms GridView inline edit capabilities anyway, this is kinda much clearer and better - one view for viewing and another for edit/new.

Answer 2

We have just rolled our own due to limited functionality requirements on our grids. We use some JQuery here and there for some niceties like pagination and that is all we really need.

If you need something a little more fully featured you could check out ExtJs grids here.

Also MvcContrib has a grid implementation that you could check out - try here. Or more specifically here.

Answer 3

We have been using jqGrid on a project and have had some good luck with it. Lots of options for inline editing, etc. If that stuff isn't necessary, then we've just used a plain foreach loop like @Hrvoje.

Answer 4

I just discovered Telerik has some great components, including Grid, and they are open source too. http://demos.telerik.com/aspnet-mvc/

Answer 5

We use the MVCContrib Grid.

http://weblogs.asp.net/rajbk/archive/2010/05/08/asp-net-mvc-paging-sorting-filtering-using-the-mvccontrib-grid-and-pager.aspx

Answer 6

Is there any reason why there is no grid in the ASP.NET MVC framework? One would think that this is very often used control in any normal line of business or point of sale application.

All the forementioned grids are very nice grids but they were not built having ASP.NET MVC in mind.

Answer 7

If it is read-only a good idea would be to create a table, then apply some really easy-but-powerful JQuery to that.

For simple alternative colour, try this simple JQuery.

If you need sorting, this JQuery plug-in simply rocks.

Answer 8

Try: http://mvcjqgridcontrol.codeplex.com/ It's basically a MVC-compliant jQuery Grid wrapper with full .Net support

Answer 9

jqGrid is $299 if you use a special version that has server side integration, but it really is not that difficult to use the open source free version with ASP.NET MVC, once you get your jquery configuration straight it's almost as simple to use as any other licensed grid:

http://haacked.com/archive/2009/04/14/using-jquery-grid-with-asp.net-mvc.aspx

Answer 10

We use Slick Grid in Stack Exchange Data Explorer (example containing 2000 rows).

I found it outperforms jqGrid and flexigrid. It has a very complete feature set and I could not recommend it enough.

Samples of its usage are here.

You can see source samples on how it is integrated to an ASP.NET MVC app here: http://code.google.com/p/stack-exchange-data-explorer/

Answer 11

I'm in the state of decision making too, and was going to use Telerik's MVC controls, but it reqiers commersial lisence, so what is the best "total free use" controls for displaying grid ?

Answer 12

You can use also the Insert/update/delete datagrid of my MVC Controls Toolkit available here on codeplex: http://mvccontrolstoolkit.codeplex.com/. Here you can download a complete example, here the datagrid working and here a tutorial. The DataGrid works completely client side and mantains thechange set between postback. Yes it mantains Changeset, this means, you can access both old version and modified version of each record to see what changes to pass to the DB(what need to be modified deleeted or inserted). This Changeset is mantained after several postback till you either confirm or cance the modifications on the server side.

Answer 13

I tried the example here of the Mvc Controls Toolkit grid. It appears a quite powerful and easy to use grid. The tutorial not only explain how to use the grid but also how to do paging, organize a view model and data annotations. It is worth to read it.