The Repeater control is probably the most over used control in the company that i currently work for. Almost every grid and listing has been built using this and i has made me nuts when i first started using it since i consider myself a Datagrid or a DataList guy.

One of the things I hate about it is that usually, people try to format everything in a way that the Visual Studio.NET IDE barks, squels and cry. Adding those pesky <%%> all over the code which makes the page resemble an old ASP page that any developer who has thrown those coding style into the trash bin have nightmares and gloom scapes all over their nightly pundit rest.

And since I am a good employee who follows strict coding guidelines and comply with it with utmost care.... i decided to embrace it rather than to do a holy war against this control.

But i need to do something to make my life easier.

I'm a person who likesand enjoys the WYSIWYG of visual studio and since the Repeater if not properly formatted cries like a lame duck... you cant use that feature. Thats the time that i decided to build this not-so generic control. Yup, you read it right. It's not generic! welll... lets just say that it is  currently not generic enough.. for now :) The control resembles a DataGrid but has the control and feel of a customized Repeater (since its base class is the Repeater control). I added small customizations to it but will improve it as we go thru this series of articles.

The default look:

Here's  how it looks like when a mouse hovers a row:

The look and feel of this control is driven by style sheets. although it is currently limited since there are still several customizations that i'm thinking of building and integrating with it.

Some limitations:

• The control currently only accepts DataTables as it's DataSource.
• The width property is not implemented
• It would be nice to have the rows redirect to a url when clicked.
• No design-time integration since it is currently data-driven

There's still alot of improvements that can be done with this control. I built it just for the sole purpose of making things abit easier in dealing with those IDE errors produced by <%%> formatting in templates

You can use the control however you want it. just let me know if you have made any customizations on it.

>> Download It Here <<