Question

My application is asp.net MVC, trying to bind a Telerik MVC Combobox to a model.
Here is the model:

public class Person
    {
        public int Id { get; set; }
        public string Name { get; set; }
        public bool DisplayBold { get; set; }
        public string Value
        {
            get
            {
                return string.Format("{0}|{1}", this.Id, this.DisplayBold.ToString());
            }
        }
    }

In the controller:

  var people = new List<Person>();
        people.Add(new Person { Id = 1, Name = "John Doe", DisplayBold = true });
        people.Add(new Person { Id = 2, Name = "Jayne Doe", DisplayBold = false });
        ViewData["people"] = people;
        return View();

I do get the values.

In the view:

<%= Html.Telerik().ComboBox()
       .Name("ComboBox")
           .BindTo((IEnumerable<SelectListItem>)ViewData["people"])
%>

I get the follwing error:

Unable to cast object of type 'System.Collections.Generic.List`1[caseprog.Models.Person]' to type 'System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable`1[System.Web.Mvc.SelectListItem]'.

I would appreciate your suggestions. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You can’t just cast a List of People to a IEnumerable of SelectListItem. They’re two different things.

Instead, you need to convert the list to a list of SelectListItem. You can do that in a number of ways, but this one should work:

.BindTo(new SelectList((IEnumerable<Person>)ViewData["people"], "Id", "Name"))