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Monday, July 10
ASP.NET: Adding a Null Row to a Data Bound Drop-Down List
Today's .NET tip is a quickie (previous entries here and here): When you are using a database to fill the rows of a data bound drop-down list control, you will inevitably run into an error when the bound field is null or an empty string. You don't want to add a null row to the list source, so what do you do?
This one's simple - there's a property of drop-down lists called AppendDataBoundItems. Set this to true, and you can provide one or more static entries, with rows from the list data source appened beneath them. Sample code:
So, what we have here is a drop-down list called "BoundList". This list gets its rows from a datasource called "ListDataSource", displaying the value of "EntryDescription" while binding "EntryID" to the underlying field - which is called "BoundItemID".
We then provide an empty list item to handle cases where no entry has been selected.
As always, please drop a note in the comments if this code helps you out.
