The Repeater class is not derived from the WebControl class, like the DataGrid and DataList. Therefore, the Repeater lacks the stylistic properties common to both the DataGrid and DataList. What this boils down to is that if you want to format the data displayed in the Repeater, you must do so in the HTML markup. The Repeater control provides the maximum amount of flexibility over the HTML produced.

Whereas the DataGrid wraps the DataSource contents in an HTML < table >, and the DataList wraps the contents in either an HTML < table > or < span > tags (depending on the DataList’s RepeatLayout property), the Repeater adds absolutely no HTML content other than what you explicitly specify in the templates. While using Repeater control, If we wanted to display the employee names in a bold font we’d have to alter the “ItemTemplate” to include an HTML bold tag, Whereas with the DataGrid or DataList, we could have made the text appear in a bold font by setting the control’s ItemStyle-Font-Bold property to True.

The Repeater’s lack of stylistic properties can drastically add to the development time metric. For example, imagine that you decide to use the Repeater to display data that needs to be bold, centered, and displayed in a particular font-face with a particular background color. While all this can be specified using a few HTML tags, these tags will quickly clutter the Repeater’s templates. Such clutter makes it much harder to change the look at a later date. Along with its increased development time, the Repeater also lacks any built-in functionality to assist in supporting paging, editing, or editing of data. Due to this lack of feature-support, the Repeater scores poorly on the usability scale.

However, The Repeater’s performance is slightly better than that of the DataList’s, and is more noticeably better than that of the DataGrid’s. Following figure shows the number of requests per second the Repeater could handle versus the DataGrid and DataList

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