Having difficulty using an ASP.NET MVC ViewBag and DropDownListfor

Question

My difficulty is how to use ViewBag with DropdownListFor?

In my controller I am having:

TestModel model = new TestModel();
ViewBag.Clients = model.Clients;
ViewBag.StatusList = model.StatusList;
ViewBag.enumStatus = model.enumStatus;
ViewBag.intClient = model.intClient;

In my TestModel

public SelectList Clients { get; set; }       
public SelectList StatusList { get; set; }
public ActiveStatus enumStatus { get; set; }
public int? intClient { get; set; }

In my View

I want to use DropDownListFor to display the ViewBag values, how can I do that?

Answer 1

You could do this:

@Html.DropDownListFor(x => x.intClient, ViewBag.Clients)

But I would recommend you to avoid ViewBag/ViewData and profit from your view model:

public ActionResult Index()
{
    var model = new TestModel();
    model.Clients = new SelectList(new[]
    {
        new { Value = "1", Text = "client 1" },
        new { Value = "2", Text = "client 2" },
        new { Value = "3", Text = "client 3" },
    }, "Value", "Text");
    model.intClient = 2;
    return View(model);
}

and in the view:

@Html.DropDownListFor(x => x.intClient, Model.Clients)