Most web applications need to show large quantities of data but usually we do not show all the information on a single web page. It is very common to show only a portion of the information in the current page and to allow the user to navigate to other portions of the data. Some of the controls ASP.NET 2.0 provides have integrated paging support, but it is not very customizable. Other ASP.NET controls just do not provide any paging support so the developer has to provide the user interface and code to add paging support.

The PagerDataSource control helps us to show only a portion of the data at a time. We have to provide the data to display to the PagerDataSource control and it will render the user interface to navigate to the different pages of our data. It will also provide paged data to the controls that we want. What is even better, we can add paging support with no code at all if we are using the data source controls introduced in ASP.NET 2.0. You will be amazed to see several synchronized pagers for the same control with no code at all!

Providing paged data to another control is not the only thing that the PagerDataSource does. The PagerDataSource also exposes rich design-time support, unlimited customization, better search engine positioning for web pages and much more! For more information take a look at the Features page.

To see all the features of the PagerDataSource in action, take a look at the Live Demo section.