Return muliple selectlist with one actionresult

Tuesday, August 9, 2011 by Nate Bross

Someone asked on Stack Overflow:

I’d like to display 2 SelectList in one View. So obviously, I can only use 1 ActionResult to render the view.

public ActionResult IndexStudents(Docent docent, int lessonid, int classid)
        {
            return View(new SelectList(docent.ReturnStudentsNormalAsString(lessonid, classid)));
            return View(new SelectList(docent.ReturnStudentsNoClassAsString(lessonid, classid)));            
        }

But of course, this does not work. How could I fix it? Maybe making use of a Dictionary?

I want my output look like this:

<div class="editor-field">
                     <%: Html.DropDownList("IndexStudentsNormal", 
                    Model as SelectList) %> 
 </div>
<div class="editor-field">
                     <%: Html.DropDownList("IndexStudentsNoClass", 
                    Model as SelectList) %> 
 </div>

So I’d like to use 2 models, one for each selectlist… one with normal students and one with students who are not subscribed for lessons.

How could I do that?

I posted the following answer, which was chosen as the accepted answer:

You need to define a model with two SelectLists:

// new class in your project
public class SelectListModel
{
    public SelectList SL1 { get; set; }
    public SelectList SL2 { get; set; }
}


// updated version of your ActionResult    
public ActionResult IndexStudents(Docent docent, int lessonid, int classid)
{
    var myslm = new SelectListModel 
    {
        SL1 = new SelectList(docent.ReturnStudentsNormalAsString(lessonid, classid),
        SL2 = new SelectList(docent.ReturnStudentsNoClassAsString(lessonid, classid)
    };
    return View(myslm);
}


// updated view code
<div class="editor-field">
    <%: Html.DropDownList("IndexStudentsNormal", Model.SL1 as SelectList) %>  
</div>
<div class="editor-field">
    <%: Html.DropDownList("IndexStudentsNoClass", Model.SL2 as SelectList) %>
</div>

Originally posted on Stack Overflow — 0 upvotes (accepted answer). Licensed under CC BY-SA.