Introduction
Anybody in the DB world knows what paging database results is and its effect.
From the time I had started getting into good old classic ASP, I was intrigued
with the ability to divide large sets of data into sections of x records per
page. One thing that I didn't like about paging is that it seemed sites incorporated
just a < Prev and Next > link on the search results page. I wasn't satisfied
with such a lackluster paging technique, and from there I searched high and
low on every ASP Web site I could find to see if there was code to show more
advanced
paging options, such as how many pages were remaining to be paged through,
or, if the next page was the last page of results, how many records were on
that
last page. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any such code, so I had set out to
do it myself. (To see the proposed paging enhancements I like, check out the live demo for this article...)
I have since coded a number of techniques for advanced paging in classic ASP,
but my latest challenge has been to incorporate the same paging techniques
in ASP.NET! (For more information on ASP.NET, be sure to visit the ASP.NET
Article Index.) Pssst, don't ask me to talk about redoing my app in Beta 1,
and upon upgrading to Beta 2 was horrified that my code needed to be redone....
by the way, the code in this article is all Beta 2 compliant.
Now, if anyone has looked into the Microsoft .NET SDK and Quickstart
samples you will find custom paging samples, but it's the usual next and prev stuff.
Now let's see how we can kick this paging up a notch and tell us more detail
about our data output.
This article was originally published on 4guysfromrolla.com.