Best practice for loading a lot of DropDownLists in asp.net MVC 2

Question

Hi, I have many pages with many dropdowns in them and I am wondering whats the best practice for filling all those dropdowns in an MVC 2.0 app, am thinking of creating a template for all because I wanna use special script on each one, but what about using ajax to initially load the dropdownlist items values. maybe through creating a controller specifically for pulling the values for dropdowns and returning as jsonresults.

any ideas about doing this , in a better way?

The most important part for me is what would be the best approach to load all those values into a single view

Answer 1

I agree with SF. You could use a component library which allows you to prepare your data in a more user friendly manner such as RichFaces, or iceFaces. If dropDowns is your thing, both component libraries have lots of different options for dropDowns and in you can specify a backing class which could act as your template although you should avoid them if possible, bindings allows you to programmatically create dropDownMenus (in Richfaces anyway).