Set Silverlight combobox selected item from string name

Question

I am trying to set the selected item in my silverlight combobox from a string.

In this example lets say I have a combobox named "MyComboBox" as follows:

<ComboBox Height="23" x:Name="MyComboBox" Width="200" HorizontalAlignment="Left">
    <ComboBoxItem Tag="0" Content="Pizza" IsSelected="True"/>
    <ComboBoxItem Tag="1" Content="Soda"/>
    <ComboBoxItem Tag="2" Content="Wings"/>
    <ComboBoxItem Tag="3" Content="Bread Sticks"/>
</ComboBox>

I am randomly selecting a string value above from a list to simulate a users saved preference. The problem I am facing is trying to grab the index of "MyComboBox" from a string.

I've tried using MyComboBox.items wtih LINQ but that has taken me nowhere.

There are some similar questions here on stack overflow but none of these have been answered.

Solution 1

If you have a reason that you have to wrap the strings in ComboBoxItem then this should work.

MyComboBox.Items.SelectedItem = 
    MyComboBox.Items.SingleOrDefault(c => (c as ComboBoxItem).Content == myString);

I would recommend to not directly insert ComboBoxItem and set items to String or setup a collection in code and bind to it.

Solution 2

Hi i am applied function for encountred index in Combobox

private int Search_Item_Return_Index(ComboBox combo, string Search)
     {
         int index=-1;

         foreach (ComboBoxItem item in combo.Items)
         {
             index++;
             string var = item.Content.ToString() ;
             if (var.Equals(Search))
             {
                 return index;
             }

         }


         return index;

     }

Solution 3

You can achieve this by using the following.

SetSelectedItem("Pizza");

/// Set selected item as string.

    private void SetSelectedItem(string selectedString)
    {
        Func<ComboBoxItem, ComboBoxItem> selectionFunc = (item) =>
        {
            if(item.Content.ToString() == selectedString)
                return item;
            return null;
        };

        this.MyComboBox.SelectedItem = MyComboBox.Items.Select(s => selectionFunc(s as ComboBoxItem)).FirstOrDefault();
    }

Comments

[Mitchell Skurnik]

All this returns is -1 no matter what I set inside of the IndexOf

[KeithMahoney]

Are you adding Strings to the ComboBox? If you do MyComboBox.Items[0], what type of object do you get back?

[Mitchell Skurnik]

@KeithMahney System.Windows.Controls.ComboBoxItem

[rediVider]

As I said, this works if you are adding strings to the combobox. If you set var myPizzaObject = new Food("Pizza"); MyComboBox.Items.Add(myPizzaObject); then, if its selected, the MyComboBox.SelectedItem is your myPizzaObject. To find it you would need to have a reference to myPizzaObject stored somewhere, and use MyComboBox.Items.IndexOf(myPizzaObject).

[Mitchell Skurnik]

is there any way to get the Index of if you are not adding strings to it but are defining the comboboxitems how I have it in my updated question/example?

[Mitchell Skurnik]

this works perfectly. Thank you. I have marked this as the answer.

[Mitchell Skurnik]

The only modification I did was to add .ToString() at the end of the .Content to compare string values