Question

I get the feeling I’m missing something really basic about the asp.net page life cycle here.

I have a CheckBoxList (Although the same thing happens with a ListBox)

    <asp:CheckBoxList runat="server" ID="cblCountriesAccessible" DataTextField="Text" />

I’m adding a bunch of ListItems to it

        var lbData = new List<ListItem>();
        lbData.Add(new ListItem("x", "", true));
        lbData.Add(new ListItem("y", "", false));

Then Binding them to the CheckBoxList

    cblCountriesAccessible.DataSource = lbData;
    cblCountriesAccessible.DataBind();

And every time the items in the list show up at unchecked (or unselected in a ListBox)
If I add the ListItems directly to the control in the markup, they show up just fine as selected or unselected.

    <asp:ListItem Text="x" Value="" Selected="True" />

What am I doing wrong in the code that selected doesn’t carry through? I’ve tried binding CheckBoxes in with Checked set to true, and the same thing happens.

Edit: OK, I wasn’t setting Selected correctly. I’m now using

        var lbData = new List<ListItem>();
        var l1 = new ListItem("yy", "", true) {Selected = true};
        var l2 = new ListItem("xx", "", true) {Selected = false};

        lbData.Add(l1);
        lbData.Add(l2);

And they’re still not loading as checked

Answer 1

You can create ListItem change its Selected property and add in collection.

ListItem li1 = new ListItem("x", "", true);
ListItem li2 = new ListItem("x", "", true); 
li1.Selected = true; 
li2.Selected = true;
cblCountriesAccessible.Items.Add(li1);
cblCountriesAccessible.Items.Add(li2);