Introduction
The DataGrid Web server control is a powerful tool for displaying information from a data source. It is easy to use; you can display editable data in a professional-looking grid by setting only a few properties. At the same time, the grid has a sophisticated object model that provides you with great flexibility in how you display the data.

This paper addresses some of the questions about customizing grid display that are commonly asked in newsgroups, on Web sites, and in other developer forums. The techniques described here are sometimes quite simple and at other times somewhat involved. In each case, however, they address a question of how to go beyond the basic functionality of the DataGrid control.

This paper assumes that you are already familiar with the control — how to add it to a form and configure it to display data. You should also understand how to put a row in the grid into edit mode and other basic tasks. (For details, see DataGrid Web Server Control.) Finally, you will find it helpful to know how to work with templates — adding template columns to the grid and layout out controls inside a template.

Windows Forms versus Web Forms DataGrid Control
The Web Forms DataGrid control is not the same as the Windows Forms equivalent. It is a common (and not unreasonable) assumption that they are the same control, or at least have identical functionality. However, the entire programming paradigm for Web Forms is quite different from that for Windows Forms. For example, Web Forms pages perform a round trip to the server for any processing; they must manage state; they feature a very different data-binding model; and so on.

Because of these differences, there are also significant differences in their respective controls, including the DataGrid control. As a general rule, the Web Forms DataGrid control includes less built-in functionality. A few examples of differences in the Web Forms DataGrid control are:

It does not inherently support master-detail data structures.
As with other Web server controls, it does not support two-way data binding. If you want to update data, you must write code to do this yourself.
You can only edit one row at a time.
It does not inherently support sorting, although it raises events you can handle in order to sort the grid contents.
On the other hand:

You can bind the Web Forms DataGrid to any object that supports the IEnumerable interface.
The Web Forms DataGrid control supports paging.
It is easy to customize the appearance and layout of the Web Forms DataGrid control as compared to the Windows Forms one. (Details are provided later in this paper.)
Controlling Column Width, Height, and Alignment
By default, the DataGrid control sizes rows and columns to fit the overall height and width that you have assigned to the grid. Within the overall grid width, it sizes columns according to the width of the column heading text. All data is displayed left-justified by default.

To control column characteristics, you should turn off auto column generation by setting the AutoGenerateColumns property to false. In fact, you should set this property to true only for short-term uses, such as quick proof-of-concept pages or demonstrations. For production applications, you should add columns explicitly. The individual columns can be bound columns or template columns.

To set the column width, you create a style element for that column and then set the element's Width property to standard units (say, pixels). The following example shows you what the HTML syntax looks like for an ItemStyle element with its Width property set.

<asp:BoundColumn DataField="title" SortExpression="title"
HeaderText="Title">
<ItemStyle Width="100px"></ItemStyle>
</asp:BoundColumn>
Alternatively,