Developer Forum

I am populating a dropdownlist from SQL. The query returns the correct
values (and no NULLs in any fields). The listitem.value is populated
with an int ID field, and listitem.text with a varchar description
field. The problem is, for some reason, I cannot access the numeric ID
after item #5 in the dropdown box.
After item #5, if I try to read the ListItem.value, I get the
ListItem.text. If I run the query in Query Analyzer, I can see the
values all are there (none are NULL), and should be populated in the
dropdown. I am using VS.NET 2003 and SQL 2000. Has anyone seen an
error such as this? Is there a limit to the size of a dropdownlist? I
am using IE 6. Thanks...

Here is what I get when I traverse the dropdownlist contents:

Ordinal ListItem1.value ListItem1.text
------------------------------------------------
0001 -1 Select One ...
0002 98404 My List Item 1
0003 65370 My List Item 2
0004 89438 My List Item 3
0005 4440 My List Item 4
0006 My List Item 5 My List Item 5
0007 My List Item 6 My List Item 6
0008 My List Item 7 My List Item 7
...
0517 My List Item 516 My List Item 516
0518 My List Item 51 My List Item 517

I've never met such problem, everything is ok in my app.

so can you paste the Dropdownlist loading code here, let's have a look.

Found the problem.
This behavior was caused by a NULL value getting stuck into the 6th
element's ListItem.value field. All elements in the dropdown after
that came up NULL, even if I had explicitly assigned them a value.

So anyone with dropdown list problems, remember to check for
* non-unique ListItem.values
* NULL ListItem.values