Programatically building an HTML table in C#

These are the minimum using directives to add at the top of the code behind for building an HTML table from a SQL Server to a SqlDataReader concisely.

[codesyntax lang=”csharp”]

using System.Web.UI.HtmlControls;
using System.Data;
using System.Data.SqlClient;

[/codesyntax]

Your table in the aspx file can be as simple as

[codesyntax lang=”html4strict”]

<table id="Products" runat="server"></table>

[/codesyntax]

And the code behind that does the work,  taking the value from a dropdown list control called Category, and retrieving data from Northwind is

[codesyntax lang=”csharp”]

using(SqlConnection cnn = new SqlConnection("Data Source=YOURSERVER; Database=Northwind; UID=YOURDBUSERID; PWd=YOURDBPASSWORD"))
      {
        SqlCommand cmd;
        SqlDataReader rdr;

          HtmlTableRow row = new HtmlTableRow();

          HtmlTableCell cell = new HtmlTableCell("th");
          cell.InnerText = "Product ID";
          row.Cells.Add(cell);

          cell = new HtmlTableCell("th");
          cell.InnerText = "Product Name";
          row.Cells.Add(cell);

          cell = new HtmlTableCell("th");
          cell.InnerText = "Units in stock";
          row.Cells.Add(cell);

          Products.Rows.Add(row);

          cmd = new SqlCommand("SELECT ProductID, ProductName, UnitsInStock FROM Products WHERE CategoryID = "
            + Category.SelectedValue, cnn);
          cnn.Open();
          rdr = cmd.ExecuteReader();

          while (rdr.Read())
          {
            row = new HtmlTableRow();

            cell = new HtmlTableCell();
            cell.InnerText = rdr["ProductID"].ToString();
            row.Cells.Add(cell);

            cell = new HtmlTableCell();
            cell.InnerText = rdr["ProductName"].ToString();
            row.Cells.Add(cell);

            cell = new HtmlTableCell();
            cell.InnerText = rdr["UnitsInStock"].ToString();
            row.Cells.Add(cell);

            Products.Rows.Add(row);

          }
        }

[/codesyntax]