Question

I am having some difficulty figuring out how to return the selected item in my HTML.DropDownList so that upon hitting a submit button, the selected item text will be looked up in my database. Here is what I have:

@{
var selectStaff = "Select LastName + ', ' + FirstName AS Name, StaffID  From StaffList ORDER BY LastName";
var data = db.Query(selectStaff);
var items = data.Select(i => new SelectListItem {
    Text = i.Name
  });
}

And then in the html..

@Html.DropDownList("Select1", items)

This works fine, as my dropdownlist is appearing and is populated, but now upon hitting a submit button, I want to be able to search that text of the selected item in my database. How would I go about doing this?

Answer 1

If you don’t bind the dropdown to a property on your view model (which would be preferable), you can still get it simply using Request.Form["Select1"] in your controller action.

If you mean that you want to be able to get the value while still on the razor page, you need to use jQuery (or other javascript) to get the value.

To get the value with jQuery:

$(document).ready(function () {
     $("#YourSubmitButtonID").click(function () {
         // Get the value from 'Select1'
         var value = $("#Select1").val();
     });
});

To do something with the value, you would have to use an ajax function, something like this:

$.ajax({
    url: '@Url.Action("ActionName", "ControllerName")',
    data: { valueToQuery: $("#Select1").val() },
    success: function (data) {
       // The data is the result
    }
});

On the controller named ControllerName in this example, you’d have the code that queries the database and returns your result.

public ActionResult ActionName(string valueToQuery)
{
     // Do your stuff here
    return Json("your result", , JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet);
{