Question

Hi i need to populate a dropdownlist. I designed a datasource and assigned it to dropdownlist. The dropdown populated correctly. But the problem is that i need to add a default value say “default” at the starting of the dropdownlist( and this value default is not in the database.

I did this :

 <asp:DropDownList ID="classInstructor" runat="server" DataSourceID="SqlDataSource3" 
                DataTextField="InstrName" DataValueField="InstrName">

        <asp:ListItem Value="Default" Text="Default" Selected="True"></asp:ListItem>


        </asp:DropDownList>

But default doesn’t show up on dropdown. Probably, the way i did was wrong. Can u let me know the best way to handle this.

Answer 1

Set the AppendDataBoundItems property to true on the dropdown list and the items from the data source will appear after any ListItems you add in the markup e.g.

<asp:DropDownList ID="classInstructor" runat="server" DataSourceID="SqlDataSource3" 
    DataTextField="InstrName" DataValueField="InstrName" AppendDataBoundItems="true">
    <asp:ListItem Value="Default" Text="Default" Selected="True"/>
</asp:DropDownList>