The GridView, FormView, and DetailsView controls all contain built-in paging functionality. By setting a few properties, it’s possible to have any of these controls automatically include a paging interface. The ListView, however, does not include built-in paging functionality. Instead, Microsoft decoupled the paging logic from the ListView and moved it into a separate Web control – the DataPager. Paging Through Data with the ListView and DataPager Controls , an earlier article in this series, explored how to use the DataPager to implement a paging interface for the ListView. By default, the DataPager renders Buttons, LinkButtons, or ImageButtons in the paging interface for the Next, Previous, First, Last, and numeric page number buttons. When clicked, these buttons cause a postback, at which point the appropriate set of records are bound to the ListView. Unfortunately, search engines cannot crawl a site using postbacks; instead, they rely on links they find on your site. Consequently, a search engine will only index the first page of data displayed by a ListView, because it cannot reach the subsequent pages.

When a browser requests an ASP.NET page from a web server, the ASP.NET engine takes that request through a number of steps that, together, generate the resulting markup, which is returned to the requesting browser for display.