Best way of implementing DropDownList in ASP.NET MVC 2?

Question

I am trying to understand the best way of implementing a DropDownList in ASP.NET MVC 2 using the DropDownListFor helper. This is a multi-part ques

Answer 1

I find it more intuitive to work with a sequence of SelectListItems (rather than a SelectList).

For example, this would create an IEnumerable from a sequence of customer objects that you can pass to the Html.DropDownListFor(...) helper. The 'Selected' property will optionally set the default item in the dropdown list.

var customers = ... // Get Customers
var items = customers.Select(c => new SelectListItem
                             {
                                 Selected = (c.Id == selectedCustomerId),
                                 Text = c.Email,
                                 Value = c.Id.ToString()
                             });