Can the value and text properties of a dropdown list be used independently?

Can these two properties of a dropdown list in ASP.NET be used independently?

I wanted to retrieve a null value when the user selects some text; I couldn’t as it retrieves the Text property whenever the Value is null. Eg:

l1 = new ListItem("Cat", null);
Console.WriteLine(l1.Value);

The output is

Cat

In another situation, when both the properties have different strings, I get the string in the Value property when I use the Text property. Eg:

l2 = new ListItem("Cat", "Mouse");
DropDownList ddl = new DropDownList();
ddl.Items.Add(li);
ddl.SelectedIndex = 0;
Console.WriteLine(ddl.SelectedValue);
Console.WriteLine(ddl.Text);

The output is

Mouse
Mouse

Answers:

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Method 1

Your observation is correct. Contrary to what intuition tells us, ListControl.Text (and, thus, DropDownList.Text) does not return the Text property of the currently selected ListItem. Here’s an excerpt from the documentation:

ListControl.Text Property

Gets or sets the SelectedValue property of the ListControl control.
[…]
Remarks

The Text property gets and sets the same value that the SelectedValue property does.

To get the Text property of the selected ListItem, use SelectedItem to retrieve the currently selected list item and then access the Text property.

So, the behavior you are seeing is by design. Why did the .NET developers specify ListControl.Text in such an unintuitive way? I have no idea. Maybe it was necessary to support the ITextControl interface…

Method 2

Just set the value to some sentinel value like an empty string or some crazy string “JANDKJASD_” and handle it accordingly.

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