Question

I have a table with about 3 items. I wish to populate the Dropdown List using that table. But i have a condition that i want to show only 2 items in the Dropdown List. How can it be done?

Answer 1

You could use a view model:

public class MyViewModel
{
    public string SelectedItemId { get; set; }
    public IEnumerable<SelectListItem> Items { get; set; }
}

and then take the first 2 items (obviously if your requirements is to take some other 2 items based on some condition you could chain with the .Where() extension method in order to filter first before calling .Take()):

public ActionResult Index()
{
    var model = new MyViewModel();
    model.Items = db.Items.Take(2).ToList().Select(x => new SelectListItem
    {
        Value = x.Id,
        Text = x.SomeText
    });
    return View(model);
}

The view is standard stuff, simply call to the DropDownListFor helper:

@model MyViewModel
@Html.DropDownListFor(x => x.SelectedItemId, Model.Items)