Products

Data Converter Cleaner TUC - Unit Converter Import Export Survey Manager Tweet Controller

Developer

Article Blog Forum Interview Beginner News Startup Quiz

Users

Career

Apply Job Internship

Pricing

Login Sign Up Get a Quote

Dropdownlist from an enum in ASP.NET MVC

Jayden Bell 2945 18 Nov 2014

I'm trying to use the Html.DropDownList extension method but can't figure out how to use it with an enumeration.

Let's say I have an enumeration like this:

public enum ItemTypes
{
    Movie = 1,
    Game = 2,
    Book = 3
}

How do I go about creating a dropdown with these values using the Html.DropDownList extension method? Or is my best bet to simply create a for loop and create the html elements manually?

Ask by Jayden Bell

Updated 18 Nov 2014

1 Answers

Takeshi Okada 18 Nov 2014

I rolled Rune's answer into an extension method:

namespace MyApp.Common
{
    public static class MyExtensions{
        public static SelectList ToSelectList<TEnum>(this TEnum enumObj)
            where TEnum : struct, IComparable, IFormattable, IConvertible
        {
            var values = from TEnum e in Enum.GetValues(typeof(TEnum))
                select new { Id = e, Name = e.ToString() };
            return new SelectList(values, "Id", "Name", enumObj);
        }
    }
}

This allows you to write:

ViewData["taskStatus"] = task.Status.ToSelectList();

by using MyApp.Common

advertising

Markdown for AI

A clean, structured version of this page for AI assistants and LLMs.