Question

I have the following code to generate selectlistitems to show in my dropdownlist.

public static IEnumerable<SelectListItem> ToSelectListItems(this IEnumerable<BlogCategory>    categories, int selectedId)
    {
        return categories.OrderBy(category => category.Category)
            .Select(category => new SelectListItem
            {
                Selected = (category.ID == selectedId),
                Text = category.Category,
                Value = category.ID.ToString()
            });
    }

I want to use this helper class to generate other list items then BlogCategory. How can I accomplish this?

Answer 1

You can make a base class for your lookup entities:

public class BaseEntity
{
   public int Id {get;set;}
   public string Title {get;set;}
}

public class Category : BaseEntity
{
   //Category fields
}

public class Blog : BaseEntity
{
   //Blog fields
}  

public static IEnumerable<SelectListItem> ToSelectListItems(this IEnumerable<BaseEntity> entityList, int selectedId)
{
    return entityList.OrderBy(q => q.Title)
        .Select(q => new SelectListItem
        {
            Selected = (q.Id == selectedId),
            Text = q.Title,
            Value = q.Id.ToString()
        });
}