Recently I needed to show a drop down list of all of the enumeration values. So I did what we all do and hit up Google.
While there was plenty of information out there detailing how to convert the enum to a Dictionary<int, string> and
render it, I couldn’t find something that fit my needs.
Essentially I have an enumeration of field types. I wanted to display the names of those fields in a drop down list, but be able to make some of them prettier. Here is the enumeration:
Now I need a way to show the items in a drop down list, and set the selected one (from the Model) to selected. I decided the easiest way would be to use an editor template.
So I created the FieldType editor template in /Views/Shared/EditorTemplates using the code below:
Now when I want to render a FieldType property of an object, I can just use the Html.EditorFor extension as I would
for any other object:
And Voila!
If for some reason you cannot name your editor template the same as the type, you can supply the name of the template to the EditorFor method using one of the overloads provided.
Happy coding!