Question

I am having this function which will return list of cities based on the state.Here is the function.

public IList<string> GetCity(int index)
{
    using (var db = new DataClasses1DataContext())
    {
         var city = db.mem_cities.Where(c => c.state_id.Equals(index)).Select(c => c.city_name).ToList();
         return city;
    }
}

Now I call this function from my code behind like this.

var city = CustomerBLL.GetCity(index);

CustomerBLL is my class

Now I want to fill my DropDownList with the cities returned.
So I do something like this.

ddlCity.DataSource = city;
ddlCity.DataBind();

This works fine.Earlier I tried using foreach loop

foreach (var c in city)
{
    ddlCity.Items.Add(c.city);
}

But it gave an error

string does not contain a definition for string

So my question is suppose if I wanted to iterate through the List what should I return from the function.

Can someone point me where I am going wrong?

Answer 1

Return not a city names (City.Name) but cities themselves:

public IList<City> GetCities(int stateId)
{
     return db.Cities.Where(c => c.StateId == stateId)
                     .ToList();
}

var cities = GetCities(x);
foreach (var c in cities)
{
    ddlCities.Items.Add(c.CityName);
}

var newCity = new City { CityName = "Home", StateId = x };
cities.Add(newCity);