Hello,

I am a newbie and I am trying to get the dropdownlists on my page to default to 'Choose' or 'Select' by default. However the dropdownlists are binding to a database and those aren't values in it. Please help.

Thanks

Usually you do this by first binfing the DDL to the dataset, then you manually add a "Choose" item at the beginning:

ddl.Items.Insert(0, New ListItem(...))

This will add the new ListItem at the beginning of the list.

Peter
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Work smarter, not harder

I am sure it is simple but I am a bit thick.
here is my dropdownlist
<asp:DropDownList ID="DropDownList1" DataSource="<%# DataSet1.DefaultView %>" DataTextField="Bldg_Code" DataValueField="Bldg_Code" runat="server"></asp:DropDownList>

is the line you wrote to be added to this tag or does it have to go back in the head?

sorry and confused.

That line needs to be in the code-behind of the control. I was making the poor assumption that you were binding the control in code-behind/inline code and not directly within the markup.

An alternative is to build the first item into your query. In MSSQL you could union two queries to get the first item and then the rest:

SELECT 'Choose...', -1 AS <value field>
UNION
SELECT <text field>, <value field> FROM <table>...
ORDER BY <value field>

Thanks Peter. I don't know much about code-behind yet. so I'll leave that one for now.