The Dropdown List and all the List type field controls share one common element which is the “List Item”.

A List Item is what appears in the Dropdown List when you click on the down arrow. A List Item is made up of two parts the “Text” and the “Value” parts. These two values can be the same, or as an example in a list of US states “New York” will be the Text part and “NY” will be the Value part.

With the Dropdown List, it is always a best practice to enter a Prompt for the user as the first item in the list for example: Enter “<< Select >>” for the Text part and “0” for the Value part. This will ensure that Validation can be applied to the field forcing the user to make a selection from the list. Without Validation, users will often submit the form without making a selection, submitting the first item in the Dropdown List as default.

Adding the Dropdown List will introduce new features, and make use of some which have already been covered:

• Use of the Auto-Fill feature which in the case of the Dropdown will find the correct value in the list and pre-select that for the user
• Manually adding a Item to the List Items form
• Adding List Items by using the Fill List Items with States from a selected Country feature

We will add a Required Field Validator to this Dropdown List in the Validation section.