Question

Every time I click an ASP button on my page to select an item in my dropdown list, it is only choosing the first item in the list. It is as if every time I click a button the page refreshes and all variables reset. How do you choose an item from a dropdown when using dynamic data from a database?

Answer 1

This sounds indicative of populating the DropDownList in Page_Load. Is that the case? (I’m assuming you’re using WebForms.) If you’re populating the control in Page_Load then you’ll want to wrap it in a conditional:

if (!IsPostBack)
{
  // populate your controls from data
}

Otherwise, they’ll get re-populated with each postback. When you click a button or perform some other action on the page which initiates a postback, Page_Load is called before the event handler. So in effect, this is happening:

1. User navigates to the page
2. Page_Load clears and re-populates the DropDownList
3. User chooses an item in the DropDownList
4. User clicks a button
5. Page_Load clears and re-populates the DropDownList
6. Button handler gets the current selection from the DropDownList, which is the default.