Which datagrid to use for an ASP.NET MVC2 project?

Question

I am developing a commercial MVC2 application that requires a grid with some form of callback update to support more than 10,000 rows. It should also support relatively rich content (icons, multi-line descriptions, etc.). Although this requires the usual swap / scroll / sort functions, grouping does not require support. So nothing special.

The commercial grids I was looking at were Component Art and Telerik, which look pretty good, but there might be a bit of OTT for what I need. They also make $ 800 and $ 999 respectively (1 developer).

I also looked at jqGrid and the grid from MvcContrib. They look fine, but for a commercial application, I am worried that these may be risky options - although this may not be the case.

I would really appreciate any views / experience on these networks, or perhaps you can offer a better option / approach.

FYI I use EF4 and C #.

Answer 1

I have a lot of experience with jqGrid, networks from DevExpress and telerik, as well as ExtJS. Of course, my favorite band is jqGrid. I'm not interested in the lack of support or the project that is leaving. They recently introduced a redesigned grid for use with MVC: http://www.trirand.com/blog/?p=639

telerik and DevExpress are both excellent in their own way. My friend had problems with the telerisk model, and I experienced quite a lot of "html bloat" from the DevExpress grid. telerik has great support for performing operations such as reordering columns on the client side, while the DevExpress grid requires a callback to do this.

ExtJS is great, but I really feel it is a very heavy JavaScript grid. Performance in IE can be terrible with the ExtJS network. This is usually good if you do not have a large number of columns or do not try to place more than one grid on a page. You will definitely want to put ExtJS grids in the Tab controls, since there are all kinds of problems when the grid is rendered onto an invisible element.

In fact, we recently decided to switch all the grids used in our reporting system to telerik Silverlight grids, which perform fine compared to their JavaScript counterparts.

Hope this helps, and good luck.

Answer 2

Honestly, you can develop your own with MVC quite easily, giving you everything you need. Although I suggest that if you need something fast that works, the MvcContrib grid is gorgeous.

Answer 3

Take a look at the MVC Controls Toolkit dataset. He looks quite flexible. It allows you to edit, delete, paste and swap. In addition, it is very easy to move changes to the database in the controller. Take a look at this here .

Answer 4

There is a DevExpress grid, the same as Telerik, which may again be above you. However, you can buy the grid yourself, and not the whole package, although this may not be worth it, since the grid is almost half the cost of the package.

Answer 5

My last component snapshot for ASP.NET MC was not successful. Its much harder to have a controll for MVC and then for the old school ASP.NET.

• The routing that the controller requires should display the routing of your application well.
• everything becomes much more complicated if the page has more than 1 grid.
• If the control should work for clients that do not support Javascript, your choice is even more limited.
• If the browser's back button should work, your choice is even more limited.

In my case, it turned out that it is much better to use simple html and jquery to implement paging, sorting and filtering for a table. I would draw a line if your site is a more accessible website (like mine) or an application that has a web interface.

Answer 6

We use the ExtJS grid in the ASP.NET MVC project. http://www.extjs.com/deploy/dev/examples/grid/array-grid.html

Answer 7

I recently researched about this, and the win was jQgrid for performance - it's the best!