SelectListItem selected = true not working in view

Question

I have a gender select field (--Select--, Male, Female) and I\'m populating that in my controller. When the page loads, I want the gender that is selected in the model pm.

Answer 1

I suggest it's better if you use strongly typed property for SelectList (rather than using ViewBag/ViewData). I believe what you are expecting is that your dropdownlist to be pre-selected with the gender selection made in the model. Here is a solution (code is not 100% clean. But this will work)

Model

public class TestModel
{
    public string Gender { get; set; }

    public IEnumerable GenderList
    {
        get
        {
            List list = new List { new SelectListItem() { Text = "Select", Value = "Select" }, new SelectListItem() { Text = "Male", Value = "Male" }, new SelectListItem() { Text = "Female", Value = "Female" } };
            return list.Select(l => new SelectListItem { Selected = (l.Value == Gender), Text = l.Text, Value = l.Value });
        }
    }
}

Controller Action

public ActionResult MyView()
{
    TestModel m = new TestModel();
    m.Gender = "Female";
    return View(m);
}

MyView.cshtml

@model TestModel

@{
    ViewBag.Title = "MyView";
}

MyView
@using (Html.BeginForm())
{
    

          @Html.DropDownListFor(model => model.Gender, Model.GenderList)
    
}

OUTPUT

dropdown with 'Female' option selected

EDIT

Based on comments find below links to sample projects

1) https://github.com/prashanth-t/DropdownDemo_BareBones (Using the MVC 4 empty template. Smaller file size with bare minimum)

2) https://github.com/prashanth-t/DropdownDemo (Using the MVC 4 internet application template. Bigger file size)