Copy and paste to Visual Studio ASP.NET page from SQL Management Studio

As I’m bringing over some older posts from my previous blog, I thought this one might be helpful to some (notice I was using VS2005 at the time but this also works for VS2008).

So I was doing some grunt work of making a few textboxes which will be filled from a SQL table from a remote database. I decided to pop open SQL Management Studio in my second monitor and copy the field names straight from the table and paste them onto the ASP.Net page. I clicked on a field name and unknowingly left the whole row selected, hit CTRL-C, and then pasted right into the ASP.Net page. To my surprise, a Gridview showed up and its related datasource. Also, connection string was added to my Web.config. I was not aware of this functionality at all but I thought I’d post it as it could save some time for a few people.

1. With Visual Studio 2005 .NET open to an ASPX page, open SQL Management Studio.
2. Right click on the table you want to create a Gridview with and select ‘Design’.
3. Highlight the field(s) you want to show in the Gridview (use shift-select for multiples).
4. Press CTRL-C to copy to the clipboard.
5. Place the cursor in the ASPX page where you want the Gridview to appear and press CTRL-V.
6. That’s it! You will have a simple Gridview with the fields you selected, a SqlDataSource underneath it, and a connection string in your Web.Config.

Here’s an example of the resulting ASPX output:

<asp:GridView ID="GridView1" runat="server" DataSourceID="SqlDataSource2"
EmptyDataText="There are no data records to display." AutoGenerateColumns="False">
<Columns>
<asp:BoundField DataField="Processor" SortExpression="Processor" HeaderText="Processor"></asp:BoundField>
<asp:BoundField DataField="MinAmount" SortExpression="MinAmount" HeaderText="MinAmount"></asp:BoundField>
<asp:BoundField DataField="Requestor" SortExpression="Requestor" HeaderText="Requestor"></asp:BoundField>
<asp:BoundField DataField="OutputFilesPath" SortExpression="OutputFilesPath"
HeaderText="OutputFilesPath"></asp:BoundField>
</Columns>
</asp:GridView>

<asp:SqlDataSource ID="SqlDataSource1" runat="server" SelectCommand="SELECT [Processor],
 [MinAmount], [Requestor], [OutputFilesPath] FROM [tbl_Settings]”
ConnectionString=”<%$ ConnectionStrings:MPConnectionString1 %>”
ProviderName=”<%$ ConnectionStrings:MPConnectionString1.ProviderName %>”>
</asp:SqlDataSource>

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