DisplayTag Library (Java) - A better Grid than .NET's GridView control

Being doing Java for a long time and one of the most impressive library I've used is DisplayTag. This is java world's Grid solution as oppose to the GridView in the .NET world.

I have to say there are a LOT of things I like in displayTag library that I wish gridview can provide.

• First and for most, I like the internal support for export in the format of "csv, xml, excel, and pdf", try to find a good solution for those! (csv, excel support is not that bad in .NET, but try xml and pdf).
  
  In addition, through a simple configuration file, you can configure things like odd row color, even row color, ascending css, descending css, decide what export to include and what their default file names are. (globally) These made it much more configurable and it definitely had GridView beat hands down. (I guess you can define css properties in your .NET master file, but what if I don't want to use Master page in my site? Also a bit heavy that way)
• Auto Linking is an awesome feature. It automatically links email address and url fields. (I hate the fact everytime, I have to place a placeholder in my GridView or specifically use a hyperlink column to link them up, be smart ppl!)
• Row Decorator and Column Decorator.  You can create custom classes to configure how the data is displayed on each row / each column. I prefer this way better than the event based GridView control (GridViewRowEventArgs) It is more portable and I can reuse these classes in multiple pages / multiple grids.
• Grouping  I have yet to see a good solution in the GridView.
• Total Summation  I know we can do this in GridView with a little bit work on our end, but I'm just trying to point out their default support for it.
• Standard HTML attribute support  To be honest, I like this apporach better. Having GridView have its own convention and not doing it as clean as we would like, it's not good.  (Although the GridView CSS adapter does it well, it's still not as ideal)

These are just some of the features I like and there is a lot more. Mabye one day, Microsoft can come up with a Gridview that match these features.

Also, just to be fair, Gridview has a lot of its own goodies that DisplayTag doesn't have. Such as integration with objectdatasource, two way binding, Command Buttons, inline edit, expose events such as creating, created, updating, updated and etc etc.

Sometimes, I wish the excellent brains from both worlds can come together and create a unified powerful gui suite. Then again, I'm just dreaming.

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