asp.net mvc populate dropdown from web.config value

grahamor

Hi, I have a string of types in the web.config like so :

<add key="types" value="one|two|three|four|five|six"/>

I would like to populate a dropdown with these values and then use an integer for the value. I am confused how i can autoset an integer for each entry .

Desired output

<select id="types">
	<option selected="selected" value="0">one</option>
	<option value="1">two</option>
	<option value="2">three</option>
	<option value="3">four</option>
	<option value="4">five</option>
	<option value="5">six</option>
</select>

I was thinking of using a dictionary but am unsure how to set the value field (the ??? below). Could i use some sort of enumeration for this ?

public IEnumerable<SelectListItem> ReportTypes
        {
            get { return new SelectList(getReportList());}
        }

        public Dictionary<int,String> getReportList()
        {
            String reportTypes = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["types"].ToString();

            Dictionary<int, String> types = new Dictionary<int, string>([B]???[/B],reportTypes.Split('|'));

            return types;
        }

Thanks for any tips

Giblet

You could do something like this

<add key="types" value="1,one|2,two|3,three|4,four|5,five|6,six"/>

And split on "|" then split on ","

You can also use a loop for add each key to the dictionary using an incrementing index.

You could also hook up a configuration section and have a class which holds the structure which can be de-serialised from the web.config.

Procasinator

Sounds like the job of a for loop to me. Or if you like LINQ:

public IEnumerable<SelectListItem> GetReportList()
{
	string reportTypes = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["types"].ToString();
	return reportTypes.Split('|')
		.Select((text, value) => new SelectListItem { Text = text, Value = value.ToString() });
}

The only thing I would say, why do you need a numeric value? Could you not use the text as the the value, too.

You could run into a problems if you were storing the chosen values somewhere and wanted to add an item somewhere in between values. Your generated indexes would then no longer match up.