How do I dynamically set the selected option of a drop-down list using jQuery, JavaScript and HTML?

Question

For some reason, I can\'t get this to work.

My options list is populated dynamically using these scripts:

function addOption(selectId, value, text, sele         


        

Answer 1

The defaultSelected attribute is not settable, it's just for informational purposes:

Quote:

The defaultSelected property returns the default value of the selected attribute.
This property returns true if an option is selected by default, otherwise it returns false.

I think you want:

$('option[value=valueToSelect]', newOption).attr('selected', 'selected');

I.e. set the selected attribute of the option you want to select.

---

Without trying to fix your code, here's roughly how I would do it:

function buildSelect(options, default) {
    // assume options = { value1 : 'Name 1', value2 : 'Name 2', ... }
    //        default = 'value1'

    var $select = $('');
    var $option;

    for (var val in options) {
        $option = $('' + options[val] + '');
        if (val == default) {
            $option.attr('selected', 'selected');
        }
        $select.append($option);
    }

    return $select;
}

You seem to have a lot of baggage and dependencies already and I can't tell you how to best integrate the selected option into your code without seeing more of it, but hopefully this helps.