Question

I am trying to set the selected item in my silverlight combobox from a string.

In this example lets say I have a combobox named “MyComboBox” as follows:

<ComboBox Height="23" x:Name="MyComboBox" Width="200" HorizontalAlignment="Left">
    <ComboBoxItem Tag="0" Content="Pizza" IsSelected="True"/>
    <ComboBoxItem Tag="1" Content="Soda"/>
    <ComboBoxItem Tag="2" Content="Wings"/>
    <ComboBoxItem Tag="3" Content="Bread Sticks"/>
</ComboBox>

I am randomly selecting a string value above from a list to simulate a users saved preference. The problem I am facing is trying to grab the index of “MyComboBox” from a string.

I’ve tried using MyComboBox.items wtih LINQ but that has taken me nowhere.

There are some similar questions here on stack overflow but none of these have been answered.

Answer 1

If you have a reason that you have to wrap the strings in ComboBoxItem then this should work.

MyComboBox.Items.SelectedItem = 
    MyComboBox.Items.SingleOrDefault(c => (c as ComboBoxItem).Content == myString);

I would recommend to not directly insert ComboBoxItem and set items to String or setup a collection in code and bind to it.