I am attempting to build an online store, and I would like to use SQL to store my product database. I have found a lot of confusing and conflicting information on storing and displaying images and creating hyperlinks inside an actual GridView control. I want to be able to do something along the lines of every other online merchant out there: a sortable database of products that can display picture, product name, and price in a GridView with a link to a details page with a full description and additional information.

Is what I'm describing even possible with ASP and a SQL database? If so, how do I store/display the images and add hyperlinks? I have tried using HTML coding in the data fields (because that is basically all I know, and I have seen indications that it should work online), but the code isn't being read and implemented - it just shows up on the page as code. Do I need to use a specific data type to use HTML? Do I need to turn on HTML coding somewhere? Do I need to be using a different language altogether?

I am currently building on Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition, and I am using the SQL database construction capabilities that are built into the program.

The regulars here don't have much experience with ASP. Here are some general ideas, but I have no idea how to implement them with ASP.

The ecommerce sites that I'm familiar with store the images and plain HTML files on a separate server from the database-driven content. The database stores the images' URLs, rather than the images themselves.

As for hyperlinks and other HTML in the item descriptions, that depends on the templates you're using. I've seen templates that retrieve the URL and link content from the database and insert them into the HTML in the template, and I've seen templates that retrieve HTML from the database and insert it "as is". I've also seen systems that define their own markup, and the template system converts that markup into HTML.

As Darin says, few people here use ASP, nor Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition (whatever that is, exactly). You could try support forums for these products,...

I'm sure you can do want you need using ASP and SQL, but I wonder: is there a particular reason for using these proprietary products rather than more widely available public (i.e. "free as in speech") systems, like PHP and MySQL? For that matter, if you don't have particular ideas on how you want to do it, why not try osCommerce for example? (Disclaimer: I made my own online shop in PHP/MySQL, and haven't looked at osCommerce. It's a bigger job making your own, but it makes adding specialised functions easy, because it's your own code.)