Question

I am having trouble getting my DropDownList to set the selected item to the value from the model.

The field in the model is just a string for the Title of the users name (Mr, Miss etc..) Below is my code so far.

<td>
@{ var list = new List<SelectListItem>(new[] {                    
    new SelectListItem{ Selected = string.IsNullOrEmpty(Model.Title), Text="",Value=""},
    new SelectListItem{ Selected = Model.Title.Equals("Mr"), Text="Mr",Value="Mr"},
    new SelectListItem{ Selected = Model.Title.Equals("Mrs"),   Text="Mrs",Value="Mrs"},
    new SelectListItem{ Selected = Model.Title.Equals("Miss"), Text="Miss",Value="Miss"},
    new SelectListItem{Selected = Model.Title.Equals("Ms"), Text="Ms",Value="Ms"}       
    });
}
@Html.DropDownListFor(m=>m.Title, list)
</td>

Answer 1

So it turns out that the only reason it doesn’t work is because my field name is Title, I changed it to Prefix and my exact code works. Way too much time spent finding that out…

Here is working code.

<td>
    @{ var list = new List<SelectListItem>(new[] {
        new SelectListItem { 
            Selected = string.IsNullOrEmpty(Model.Prefix), 
            Text="",
            Value=""
        },
        new SelectListItem { 
            Selected = Model.Prefix.Equals("Mr"), 
            Text="Mr",
            Value="Mr"
        },
        new SelectListItem {
            Selected = Model.Prefix.Equals("Mrs"),
            Text="Mrs",
            Value="Mrs"
        },
        new SelectListItem {
            Selected = Model.Prefix.Equals("Miss"), 
            Text="Miss",
            Value="Miss"
        },
        new SelectListItem {
            Selected = Model.Prefix.Equals("Ms"), 
            Text="Ms",
            Value="Ms"
        }       
      });
    }
    @Html.DropDownListFor(m => m.Prefix, list)
</td>