Support for optgroup in dropdownlist .NET MVC?

Question

Continuing on from this question programmatically creating a drop down list I would like my list to have several optgroup lists too. Is this currently possible?

I know I need to pass a selectList to a dropDownList but do not know how to add text,value,optgroup to the selectList.

I want the end result to produce:

<option value="">Please select</option>
<optgroup label="Option A">
 <option value="1">1</option>
 <option value="2">2</option>
 <option value="3">3</option>
 <option value="4">4</option>
</optgroup>
<optgroup label="Option B">
    <option value="a">A</option>
    <option value="b">B</option>
    <option value="c">C</option>
</optgroup>

Answer 1

Looking through the code on www.codeplex.com/aspnet, it doesn't appear that neither the SelectList nor the DropDownList extension method supports the use of OptGroup in a select. Looks like you'll need to write your own extension method and extend SelectListItem to contain the grouping or generate the select manually in markup.

Answer 2

I just write a extensions for do this, see it:

---

using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Web.Routing;

namespace System.Web.Mvc.Html
{
    public static class GroupDropListExtensions
    {
        public static string GroupDropList(this HtmlHelper helper, string name, IEnumerable<GroupDropListItem> data, string SelectedValue, object htmlAttributes)
        {
            if (data == null && helper.ViewData != null)
                data = helper.ViewData.Eval(name) as IEnumerable<GroupDropListItem>;
            if (data == null) return string.Empty;

            var select = new TagBuilder("select");

            if (htmlAttributes != null)
                select.MergeAttributes(new RouteValueDictionary(htmlAttributes));

            select.GenerateId(name);

            var optgroupHtml = new StringBuilder();
            var groups = data.ToList();
            foreach (var group in data)
            {
                var groupTag = new TagBuilder("optgroup");
                groupTag.Attributes.Add("label", helper.Encode( group.Name));
                var optHtml = new StringBuilder();
                foreach (var item in group.Items)
                {
                    var option = new TagBuilder("option");
                    option.Attributes.Add("value", helper.Encode(item.Value));
                    if (SelectedValue != null && item.Value == SelectedValue)
                        option.Attributes.Add("selected", "selected");
                    option.InnerHtml = helper.Encode(item.Text);
                    optHtml.AppendLine(option.ToString(TagRenderMode.Normal));
                }
                groupTag.InnerHtml = optHtml.ToString();
                optgroupHtml.AppendLine(groupTag.ToString(TagRenderMode.Normal));
            }
            select.InnerHtml = optgroupHtml.ToString();
            return select.ToString(TagRenderMode.Normal);
        }
}

    public class GroupDropListItem
    {
        public string Name { get; set; }
        public List<OptionItem> Items { get; set; }
    }

    public class OptionItem
    {
        public string Text { get; set; }
        public string Value { get; set; }
    }
}