Question

I am mostly an ASP.NET developer but I am working on a WinForms app and noticed a large difference between the ASP.NET combobox (html select) and that of WinForms. I found (maybe incorrectly so) that WinForm’s combobox only has a “label” whereas ASP.NET allows you to specify a “label” and a “value”.

I am looking to use a WinForms combobox (or another comparable control) with a label and a value (Foobar / 42329). Is this possible? I have attempted to search for the answer but haven’t come up with much. If there is no way to accomplish that, how does one go ahead and design a WinForm combobox that would represent say Cities with their associated database id?

• Toronto / 2324
• Montreal / 64547
• Vancouver / 1213

Answer 1

I can think of a few ways:

• override the ToString() of a City class to return Name + " / " + Id;
• ditto, but with a TypeConverter
• add a DisplayText property that return the same, and use DisplayMember
• build a shim class for the data

For the last:

var data = cities.Select(city => new {
     Id = city.Id, Text = city.Name + " / " + city.Id }).ToList();
cbo.ValueMember = "Id";
cbo.DisplayMember = "Text";
cbo.DataSource = data;