What is the best practice for DropDownList with static items?

  • Thread starter Thread starter bogdan
  • Start date Start date
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bogdan

Hi,

I'd like to use a dropdownlist in a formview to map numeric values to
'user-friendly' descriptions. The dropdownlist items' values need to be
bound to a column in a db table. For example, users might see "Type1",
"Type2", and "Type3" but corresponding values stored in db are 1, 2, and 3.
Seems like a very common scenario. Could anyone please let me know what the
best practice is in this case? Should I create a custom data source or
simply bind an array to the dropdownlist in Page_Load()? I remember seeing
a sample that I liked (might've been one of Scott Mitchell's tutorials) some
time ago but can't find it now.

I'm quite comfortable with binding db data sources to controls.

Thanks,
Bogdan
 
the very simplest of solutions would be to create a simple stored procedure,
retrieving the items, putting the 1, 2 & 3 items as the DataValueField item
of the Dropdownlist, and the Type2 items as the DataTextField (visible)

You could either create a Dataset (xsd), and ObjectDataSource for this, or
simply create a SQLDataSource for it

David Wier
http://aspnet101.com
http://iWritePro.com - One click PDF, convert .doc/.rtf/.txt to HTML with no
bloated markup
 
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