Question

I have a create method in my controller and this opens up a view. On the view the user can enter data to populate the model. Some of that data comes from select lists. These select lists are populated from the database.

What I would like to know is should I:

a) Get data for the select lists in the controller, populate a field like this:

public IEnumerable<SelectListItem> Statuses { get { return GetStatusType(); } }

pass Statuses to the model and then do a for () to loop through statuses and create a select list and options HTML

b) Do nothing in the controller and in the view have the following in the model:

<select id="Q_StatusID" name="Q.StatusID">@Html.Raw(
SelectHelper.Status(false, @Model.PageMeta.StatusID))</select>

Where the SelectHelper is C# code that gets all the select list and options HTML.

c) Some better way:

Answer 1

I would go with the first one. some thing like this

a helper method

   public List<SelectListItem> getAllSelectList(List<Items> lists)
            {
                List<SelectListItem> selectListItems = new List<SelectListItem>();
                foreach (Term term in lists)
                {
                    selectListItems.Add(new SelectListItem() { Text = term.yourselectfield, Value = term.your value });

                }
                return selectListItems;
            }

on your controller

//assuming you GetStatusType() method will return list of objects

ViewData.selectlist=getAllSelectList(GetStatusType());

on your view, if you are using Razor

@Html.DropDownList("selectlist", null, "Choose")

or

<%: Html.DropDownList("selectlist", null, "Choose") %>