Question

Quick question. Its easy enough to bind a value and text to a drop down in markup, how can I do this in C#.

To bind a single column collection

 _dd_City.DataSource = LNQ.tbl_cities.Select(a => a.desc);
 _dd_City.DataBind();

however say I wanted to set the value to an integer value and the text to the city name, how could I do that ??

Answer 1

You just need to specify the name of the properties from the objects in your collection that will be used for the text and value like this:

_ddCity.DataTextField = "desc";
_ddCity.DataValueField = "Id";
_dd_City.DataSource = LNQ.tbl_cities.Select(a => new { a.Id, a.desc});
_dd_City.DataBind();

You can set the text and value field on your markup too.

<asp:DropDownList ID="_ddCity" runat="server" DataValueField="Id" DataTextField="desc">
</asp:DropDownList>