Question

I have to set dropdownlost to read only. I can set enabled =false. But I cannot set font color to regular dropdown text. It will show like blur. The samething I did textbox.readonly=false. There we can see font same as regular text, no change.

The same way I want read only for dropdownlist. Is there any way we can do with CSS or javascript or jQuery ?.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

There is varying browser support for this. Typically, Internet Explorer provides fewer opportunities to override the default greyed out look for disabled controls, than the other main browsers. I have struggled to do this in the past across all browsers. I would be interested to see some answers here that do this rather than my advice not to do it…

I would question why you are doing this. Your users will be used to the default look of disabled controls. It is a visual cue to them that the control is disabled. I would urge you not to disrupt this subtle visual que that people are very very used to.

Unless you can give a compelling reason to do this of course.

One way to hack this would be to not disable the dropdown list at all (taking care of the styling). Then, add an event handler to the change event that sets the dropdown back to the original value. You would have to store the original value, probably in an input of type hidden, and when you handle the change event, first check whether the value is the same as the stored value. If not, set it back. If you don’t make this check you will get an infinite loop, because setting it back to the original value will call the change event again.