asp.net offers a powerful way to render information from a database or xml file: databinding. however, sometimes you need to be able to perform the databinding for almost all of the items in the data source. or perhaps you have some special formatting or secondary data that you need to use with each row in the data source, so that you need a little finer control over how the data is bound to the control. in these cases, you will typically need to handle the onitemdatabound event, which is fired for each item as it is bound to your control. this gives you a lot of flexibility, but unfortunately the code is a little bit hairy. hopefully, having an example will help! first of all, let me explain that this example is taken from a live application: my regular expression library over at my asp.net training website, aspsmith.com. you can see it in action by clicking here. you'll see what it is doing in a moment.