There is no viewdata item of type 'ienumerable<selectlistitem>' that has the key

Question

Problem :

While binding the dropdown in MVC, I often face following error: 

There is no ViewData item of type 'IEnumerable<SelectListItem>' that has the key country.

 

Please find below my View for your reference :

@Html.DropDownList("country", (IEnumerable<SelectListItem>)ViewBag.mycountrydrop,"Select country")

 

Please find below my Controller for your reference :

List<Companyregister> mycoun = new List<Companyregister>();

mycoun = ds.getcountry();

List<SelectListItem> myitem8 = new List<SelectListItem>();

foreach( var myc in mycoun )

{

   myitem8.Add(new SelectListItem

    {

        Text = myc.country,

        Value = myc.countryid.ToString()

    });

}

ViewBag.mycountrydrop = myitem8;

return View();

I do not know how to resolve above error.

Answer 1

I had the same issue and tried all the solutions which I knew, and neither of them worked actually after long research I found the solution for the error as below:

In the action please change ViewBag.mycountrydrop = myitem8 to ViewBag.country = myitem8; and in the View please write like below :

@Html.DropDownList("country",(IEnumerable<SelectListItem>)ViewBag.country,"Select country")

Actually when you try to write as below

@Html.DropDownList("country", (IEnumerable)ViewBag.country, "Select country")

or

Html.DropDownList("country","Select Country)

it looks always in for IEnumerable<SelectListItem> in ViewBag with key country, you can also try to use this overload in this case:

@Html.DropDownList("country","Select country") // it will always look for ViewBag.country and will populate the dropdown