Adding a serial number field to the ASP .NET GridView

I was developing a page that displays some data from database in a ASP .NET GridView control through LINQ. The grid required to display a serial number field as the first column of each row.Since i was binding the result of a LINQ call(List<SomeObject>) to the grid, i had to add a new field in the "Entity/Model" Class itself and populate the data somehow before binding it to the Grid. I was not willing to add a "Serial #" field into the class only to display a serial number and was looking for a solution at the View Layer.Then i found this handy solution built into the "GridView" control itself.

<asp:gridview id="myGridView" runat="server" autogeneratecolumns="False">

<columns>
<asp:templatefield headertext="#" width="15">
<itemtemplate>
<%# Container.DataItemIndex + 1 %>
</itemtemplate>
</asp:templatefield>
</columns>
</asp:gridview>

The "Container.DataItemIndex" property does the trick and provides an index for each row item in the GridView. Since the index starts from 0, I only had to increase it by 1 to display a serial number to every row without altering the Data Access Layer. Quite useful isn't it ?