What is the difference between Datagrid, Datalist and Repeater?

            A Datagrid, Datalist and Repeater are all ASP.NET data Web controls. They have many things in common like DataSource Property, DataBind Method, ItemDataBound and ItemCreated events.

            When you assign the DataSource Property of a DataGrid to a DataSet then each DataRow present in the DataRow Collection of DataTable is assigned to a corresponding DataGridItem and this is same for the rest of the two controls also. But The HTML code generated for a DataGrid has an HTML TABLE ROW (TR) element created for the particular DataRow and its a Table form representation with Columns and Rows.

For a Datalist it’s an Array of Rows and based on the Template Selected and the RepeatColumn Property value We can specify how many DataSource records should appear per HTML <table> row. In short in DataGrid we have one record per row, but in DataList we can have five or six rows per row.

            For a Repeater Control, the DataRecords to be displayed depends upon the Templates specified and the only HTML generated is the due to the Templates.

In addition to these, DataGrid has a pin-built support for Sort, Filter and paging the data, which is not possible when using a DataList and for a Repeater Control we would require to write an explicit code to do paging.