SelectList And DropDownList

This blog for a simple way to bind DropDownListFor with SelectedList in MVC 5 and EntityFramework.

We have a controller, CountryController with an action “Add”, and the related View “Add”, and we have a SQL Server table named “Countries” with an int “Id” field and a string “CountryName” field.

I get all database data from DbContext and EntityFramework 6, so all the tables are mapped in the context.

In our CountriesModel we have:

// within the model
public SelectedList Countries {get; set;}

In the controller, within the HttpGet Add action we populate the SelectedList from Context:

// within the controller
model.Countries = new SelectList(context.Countries.ToList(), "Id", “CountryName");

Now we want to bind DropDownListFor with populated SelectedList property, so we can pass the model to View “Add”:

In the view Add we have:

@model CountriesModel

….

@Html.DropDownListFor(model=>model.Countries.SelectedValue, Model.Countries)

The result is a populated DropDownList.