Maintaining DropDownList selected index

[Phuff]

Thanks in advance! I'm trying to maintain a dl list's selected index
on postback. What I'm doing is when a person selects an item from the
drop down list I select a date in a calendar control and populate a
text box with the date. To do this I set auto postback to the drop
down list. But it always resets the selected index on post back. I
control for this in the onLoad method...

If Not Page.IsPostBack Then

If page is posted back I select the date and populate textbox.text
correctly. Selected index is lost. I even added a key to the
viewstate with the selected index and tried grabbing the value from
that, but still no go. Help please!

[Phuff]

Problem solved! Apparently if you have any duplicates in your Value
collection the selected index that is maintained through the state
defaults to the first index in that group of duplicates.

So my items correspond to the Box_Id in the table (the unique
identifier in the DB). There are 8 boxes, 1-8. Then I grab a business
related date and fill the Value collection with this, that date
corresponds to something with each box. The dates (which become
values) could all be different or the same, there is no consistency
with the dates. Well boxes 1-6 all had the same recieve date so the
value was the same for all those items. Therefore, if you select
anything within "Index" 0-5 it will default to 0 because that is the
first item in the list with the duplicated date. Same for "Index" 6-7.
So when it is maintaining its state it remembers the selected index,
but won't allow duplicates in the value field. They should provide a
property which allows duplicates in the value field."

Phuff wrote:

Also, I have another DDL on the page that I fill in the same manner and
it doesn't have these issues. I will keep digging.