DropDownListFor does not work with ViewData or ViewBag

Question

I encountered this error " There is no ViewData item of type IEnumerable that has the key 'StatusOptions' " when I try to use DropDownListFor and point to a select list

I know there are a lot of questions regarding this already but none of them solved my problem.

Say I'm implementing a dropdown list as filter for tasks based on the their statuses. So the FilterView correspond to FilterModel, but the controller is a more generic PageController which correspond to PageModel, so I cannot have the list of statuses contained in the model rather than ViewBag or ViewData.

I also don't want to hardcode the statuses in the view since they are backed by external service.

This is what I'm doing right now:

public class FilterModel
{
  public string SelectedStatus {get;set;}
}

in my PageController:

public Result ListTasks()
{
  ...
  ViewBag.StatusOptions = new SelectList (
    new[] { "New", "Pending", "Completed"}.Select(x => new SelectListItem { Value = x, Text = x }),
    "Value",
    "Text"
  );
  ...
}

in my View:

Html.DropDownListFor(model => model.SelectedStatus, (IEnumerable<SelectListItem>)ViewBag.StatusOptions)

I also tried casting it to SelectList or using ViewData['StatusOptions'], neither works.

Yohan Chung Yohan Chung · Accepted Answer · 2017-01-30T21:35:02

It seems you try to cast SelectList (type for ViewBag.StatusOptions) as IEnumerable<SelectListItem>. If you assign List<SelectListItem> to ViewBag.StatusOptions then it should work.

DropDownListFor does not work with ViewData or ViewBag

2 Answers