Best Practice for Populating a DropDownList control

[cooleddie]

Hello All,

I'm building a web form in Visual Studio .Net 2003 and have a question about populating dropdownlist controls. I know that I can populate each ddl control by adding items in the "Items (Collection)" property, but is it "better" to build some lookup tables and populate them via data binding? I seem to find a ton of info about the datagrid and data binding when searching for dropdownlist control info and I'm wondering if that is what I should be doing instead of using the Items collection. Does it just depend on how the app uses the data from the ddl? My application simply has six ddl's and one submit button that will save the selected items from the dropdownlists to a sql table. Thanks in advance!

[rrhodes]

Dim CONN As New SqlConnection("connstr")
CONN.Open()
Dim CMD As New SqlCommand("select val_field, text_field from yourtable", CONN)
Dim DR As SqlDataReader = CMD.ExecuteReader()
ddlList.DataSource = DR
ddlList.DataValueField = "val_field"
ddlList.DataTextField = "text_field"
ddlList.DataBind()
ddlList.Items.Insert(0, "SELECT...")
DR.Close()
CONN.Close()