Question

ASP.Net MVC 4

I am trying to populate a list of Countries (data from Country table in DB) in a dropdownlist. I get the following error:

The model item passed into the dictionary is of type 
System.Collections.Generic.List`1[System.Int32]', but this dictionary requires a model    item of type 'BIReport.Models.Country'.  

I am new to ASP.Net MVC and I don’t understand that error. What I feel is what Index method is returning doesn’t match with the model that I am using in the View.

Model::

namespace BIReport.Models
{
  public partial class Country
  {
    public int Country_ID { get; set; }
    public string Country_Name { get; set; }
    public string Country_Code { get; set; }
    public string Country_Acronym { get; set; }
  }

 }

Controller::

   public class HomeController : Controller
{
    private CorpCostEntities _context;

    public HomeController()
    {
        _context = new CorpCostEntities();
    }

    //
    // GET: /Home/

    public ActionResult Index()
    {
        var countries = _context.Countries.Select(arg => arg.Country_ID).ToList();
        ViewData["Country_ID"] = new SelectList(countries);
        return View(countries);
    }

}

View::

@model BIReport.Models.Country
<label>
Country @Html.DropDownListFor(model => model.Country_ID, ViewData["Country_ID"] as SelectList)
</label>

Where am I going wrong?

Answer 1

You are selecting CountryIDs, therefore you will have a list of integers passed into the view.

I think you really want something like this:

public ActionResult Index()
{
    var countries = _context.Countries.ToList();
    ViewData["Country_ID"] = new SelectList(countries, "Country_ID", "Country_Name");
    return View();
}

I’m not really sure why you have single country as a model for your view.

Update:

I’m still not sure why the model is a country, if you are just going to post the ID of the selected country you don’t necessarily need a model at all (or just have an integer). This will be just fine though:

View

@model MvcApplication1.Models.Country

@Html.DropDownListFor(m => m.Country_ID, ViewData["Country_ID"] as SelectList)