Question

I’ve got two DropDownLists within an mvc 3 based site, ‘teams’ and ‘users’ :

Select a case worker : 
@Html.DropDownList("Teams", "-- Select A Team --") 
@Html.DropDownList("Users", "-- Select A User --")

I am populating teams using the following code which works OK :

    var teams = postroomEmplyees.GetPostRoomTeams();
    ViewData["Teams"] = new SelectList(teams, "UID", "Name");

I want to delay loading of any data into ‘users’ until a value in ‘teams’ has been selected by the user… HOWEVER… if I load the page without binding anything to ‘users’ I understanbly get

'There is no ViewData item of type 'IEnumerable<SelectListItem>' that has the key 'Blah'.'

In MVC can I have a dropdownlist load without binding to it.. and if so.. what the best way to achieve this ? Thanks!

Answer 1

I actually found a much more effiecent way.

ViewBag.Users = new SelectList(Enumerable.Empty<EmployeeOverview>(), "Uid", "FullName");

I can set the type to empty and then when the page loads it does’t complain. IT stops me doing any unneeded fake loads on start.