Question

I have several ‘lookup’ fields in my models where I don’t want nulls, but on Create views it is very inconvenient that these fields keep defaulting to the first value in teh Select lists. What can I do to avoid this?

Answer 1

If I understand correctly you want the dropdown to show something like

--select a value--

And then throw a validation error if no selection is done.

You can do that by simply specifing a default value in the Html.DropDownListFor

@Html.DropDownListFor(model => model.MyValueId, Model.MyValues, "--select a value--")

In your model you will have the RequiredAttribute or in the controller you do the validation needed