How to pass the value to drop down fields in edit mode in MVC4?

Question

Hi i have three Fields in my view.That three fields are drop down. I want to pass the value to these fields when edit button is clicked. That is the values need to pass to that

Answer 1

Use the DropDownListFor helper method.

 @Html.DropDownListFor(model => model.EmployeeID,
                                    (IEnumerable)ViewData["EmployeeName"])

Now in your GET action, you need to set the EmployeeID property value of your view model.

public ActionResult Edit(int id)
{
  var objVisitorsviewModel = new VisitorsViewModel();
  // I am hard coding to 25. 
  // You may replace it with a valid Employee Id from your db table for the record
  ObjVisitorsviewModel.EmployeeID= 25; 

  return View(objVisitorsviewModel);
}

A more clean solution is to not use ViewData to transfer the data you need to render the dropdown option. You can make your code more strongly typed by simply adding a new property to your view model

public class VisitorsViewModel
{
   public List Employees { set;get;}
   public Guid? EmployeeID { get; set; }
   // Your existing properties goes here
}

Now in your GET action(create/edit), Instead of storing the data in ViewData, we will load to the Empenter code hereloyees property.

public ActionResult Edit(int id)
{
  var  vm = new VisitorsViewModel();
  vm.Employees = db.Employees.Select(s=> new SelectListItem { 
                       Value=s.EmployeId.ToString(), Text=s.DisplayName }).ToList();
  return View(vm);
}

And in your view, we will use the DropDownListFor helper method with the Employees property

@model VisitorsViewModel
@using(Html.BeginForm())
{
  @Html.DropDownListFor(s=>s.EmployeeID,Model.Employees,"Select")  
}