Question

For some reason, I can’t get this to work.

My options list is populated dynamically using these scripts:

function addOption(selectId, value, text, selected) {
    var html = '<option value="'+value+'">'+text+'</option>';
    if (selected == "on") {
        html = '<option value="'+value+'" selected="selected">'+text+'</option>';
    }
    $('#'+selectId).append(html);
}

function addSalespersonOption(id, name, defsales) {
    addOption('salesperson', id, name, defsales);
}

Here is the HTML:

<td class="text-r"><label for="salesperson">Salesperson:</label></td>
<td>
    <select id="salesperson">
        <option value="">(select)</option>
    </select>
</td>

So far, the output is:

<option value="1266852143634" selected="selected">Eric Hunt</option>

The DOM shows this:

index              2
disabled           false
value              "1266852143634"
text               "Eric Hunt"
selected           false
defaultSelected    true

But for some reason, when the page is loaded, the dropdown does not display Eric Hunt as pre selected. Nor is anything for that matter.

How can I get “selected true” instead of “defaultSelected true”?

---

EDIT: As it turns out, the above code works perfectly, thanks to the help of deceze and rosscj2533‘s answers from below. The only reason it’s not working for me is, I found Ruby code that was overwriting the select elements.

Thanks for everyone’s help on this,

Cheers

Answer 1

The defaultSelected attribute is not settable, it’s just for informational purposes:

Quote:

The defaultSelected property returns the default value of the selected attribute.
This property returns true if an option is selected by default, otherwise it returns false.

I think you want:

$('option[value=valueToSelect]', newOption).attr('selected', 'selected');

I.e. set the selected attribute of the option you want to select.

---

Without trying to fix your code, here’s roughly how I would do it:

function buildSelect(options, default) {
    // assume options = { value1 : 'Name 1', value2 : 'Name 2', ... }
    //        default = 'value1'

    var $select = $('<select></select>');
    var $option;

    for (var val in options) {
        $option = $('<option value="' + val + '">' + options[val] + '</option>');
        if (val == default) {
            $option.attr('selected', 'selected');
        }
        $select.append($option);
    }

    return $select;
}

You seem to have a lot of baggage and dependencies already and I can’t tell you how to best integrate the selected option into your code without seeing more of it, but hopefully this helps.