how to fill textboxes on a web page – Asp.net

Well, it depends. Often to display data, I will drop in say a repeater, or say a datalist control.

I even use the wizard to create the control with the fields, and then DELETE say the data source that the wizard created.

So, say we have this markup:

<asp:Repeater ID="Repeater1" runat="server">
    <ItemTemplate>
        <div style="border-style:solid;color:black;width:300px;float:left">
        <div style="padding:5px;text-align:right">

            Hotel Name: 
            <asp:TextBox ID="txtHotelName" runat="server" Text ='<%# Eval("HotelName") %>' />
            <br />                                                                                             
            First Name:
            <asp:TextBox ID="txtFirst" runat="server" Text ='<%# Eval("FirstName") %>' />
            <br />                                                                                             
            Last Name:
            <asp:TextBox ID="txtLast" runat="server" Text ='<%# Eval("LastName") %>'  />
            <br />                                                                                             
            City:
            <asp:TextBox ID="txtCity" runat="server" Text ='<%# Eval("City") %>'  />
            <br />
            Active:
            <asp:CheckBox ID="chkActive" runat="server" Checked = '<%# Eval("Active") %>'/>

            <asp:HiddenField ID="PK" runat="server" Value = '<%# Eval("ID") %>'/>
            
            <asp:Button ID="cmdDelete" runat="server" Text="Delete" style="margin-left:20px"                     
               OnClick="cmdDelete_Click"/>
        </div>
    </div>
     <div style="clear:both;height:4px"></div>
    </ItemTemplate>
 </asp:Repeater>

No, not 20 fields, but if I used the wizard to select all 20 columns during creating, I would at least not have to type out the above – but only "tweak" it after using the wizard to create that repeater, or datalist.

Ok, so now the code to fill the above.

It looks like this:

   protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        if (!IsPostBack)
        {
            LoadData();
        }
    }

    public void LoadData()
    {
        string strSQL = "SELECT * FROM tblHotels WHERE ID = 23 ORDER BY HotelName";

        using (SqlCommand cmdSQL = new SqlCommand(strSQL,
                             new SqlConnection(Properties.Settings.Default.TEST4)))
        {
            cmdSQL.Connection.Open();
            Repeater1.DataSource = cmdSQL.ExecuteReader();
            Repeater1.DataBind();
        }
    }

And we now see this:

On the other hand, if I use this SQL:

        string strSQL = "SELECT TOP 4 * FROM tblHotels ORDER BY HotelName";

Then I now get this:

So, as you can see, it no more work to display 1, or 20 of that "thing" I repeated. And I could say have the repeating go across the page, and I now have a card-view like system.

You can of course also just write code, and shove the values into textboxes. So without say a repeater control, and just he text boxes, then this would work:

        string strSQL = "SELECT * FROM tblHotels ORDER BY HotelName";
        using (SqlCommand cmdSQL = new SqlCommand(strSQL,
                             new SqlConnection(Properties.Settings.Default.TEST4)))
        {
            DataTable rstData = new DataTable();
    
            cmdSQL.Connection.Open();
            rstData.Load(cmdSQL.ExecuteReader());

            DataRow OneRow = rstData.Rows[0];

            txtHotelName.Text = OneRow["HotelName"].ToString();
            txtFirst.Text = OneRow["FirstName"].ToString();
            txtLast.Text = OneRow["LastName"].ToString();
            txtCity.Text = OneRow["City"].ToString();
            chkActive.Checked = (bool)OneRow["Active"];
            
        }

so you have a lot of options here. And for sure, one will often introduce a model framework (like older datasets, or now EF (entity framework). This gives you a model in code, and thus often you don’t have remember the field names, and you get/have a abstracted layer between you and the database.

And most of the data repeating controls are happy to use EF data, or even direct data tables like above shows.