Setting a default selected value in DropDownList in MVC3

Question

In MVC3 I have this code at my controller. It retrieves a List of IDs\\Names from Installation table and creates a ViewBag

var vs = dba.Installation.OrderBy(         


        

Answer 1

You can also create an Helper class for Dropdownlist It will have a method to set the text as by default text for every dropdownlist in you solution

Answer 2

I need to set first item in the ViewBag List as a default selected value, instead of "- Select one -" text.

Then you need to select the first item in your list (vs) and get it's id and use it as the selecedValue in the SelectList:

ViewBag.Vessels = new SelectList(vs, "InstId", "InstName", 
    vs.FirstOrDefault().InstId);

Answer 3

There's an overload for the SelectList constructor that takes 4 arguments. The last of which is the default selected object. E.g:

ViewBag.Vessels = new SelectList(vs, "InstId", "InstName", selectedValue);

Where selectedValue is an object of whatever type is in your list.