SelectListItem selected = true not working in view

Question

I have a gender select field (--Select--, Male, Female) and I\'m populating that in my controller. When the page loads, I want the gender that is selected in the model pm.

Answer 1

After searching myself for answer to this problem - I had some hints along the way but this is the resulting solution. It is an extension Method. I am using MVC 5 C# 4.52 is the target. The code below sets the Selection to the First Item in the List because that is what I needed, you might desire simply to pass a string and skip enumerating - but I also wanted to make sure I had something returned to my SelectList from the DB)

Extension Method:

public static class SelectListextensions
{

    public static System.Web.Mvc.SelectList SetSelectedValue
(this System.Web.Mvc.SelectList list, string value)
    {
        if (value != null)
        {
            var selected = list.Where(x => x.Text == value).FirstOrDefault();
            selected.Selected = true;                
        }
        return list;
    }    
}

And for those who like the complete low down (like me) here is the usage. The object Category has a field defined as Name - this is the field that will show up as Text in the drop down. You can see that test for the Text property in the code above.

Example Code:

SelectList categorylist = new SelectList(dbContext.Categories, "Id", "Name");

SetSelectedItemValue(categorylist);

select list function:

private SelectList SetSelectedItemValue(SelectList source)
{
   Category category = new Category();

    SelectListItem firstItem = new SelectListItem();

    int selectListCount = -1;

    if (source != null && source.Items != null)
    {
        System.Collections.IEnumerator cenum = source.Items.GetEnumerator();

        while (cenum.MoveNext())
        {
            if (selectListCount == -1)
            {
                selectListCount = 0;
            }

            selectListCount += 1;

            category = (Category)cenum.Current;

            source.SetSelectedValue(category.Name);

            break;
        }
        if (selectListCount > 0)
        {
            foreach (SelectListItem item in source.Items)
            {
                if (item.Value == cenum.Current.ToString())
                {
                    item.Selected = true;

                    break;
                }
            }
        }
    }
    return source;
}

You can make this a Generic All Inclusive function / Extension - but it is working as is for me.