I have a gridview control on an ascx. Am using DAL and binding a datareader to the grid in pageload. Although I set the gridview's AllowSorting property is to true, and provided a SortExpression for each column, sorting didn't work. I could see that the Sorting and Sorted events were firing, but nothing happened; i.e. the rows didn't sort.

From reading through old posts, I THINK I learned that because I'm using  DAL and data binding, I have to handle sorting via the stored procedure. So, I rewrote the stored procedure to incllude an ORDER BY clause that's a function of input parameters. Then, from the Sorting event, I call the stored procedure (via DAL logic) and issue another databind. I get the sort field from e.SortExpression, and I manage the sort order via viewstate.  That seems to work, but I'm wondering if I actually had to do it that way. Am I missing something, or does using the DAL really preclude the gridview's automatic sorting?  Thanks in advance to anyone who can confirm this.