ASP.NET 1.1: Country DropDownList

[mikeyeli]

Hello People!

Recently i had the need to make a country dropdownlist, ive been searching all over the net, for a way to populate the dropdown from the culture or somewhere.

The thing is all examples i find, either read from a text file, or from an xml file, or from the database.

I just cant believe .net doesnt have something like that, i just think there must be an easier way to populate a country dropdown from a source provided by .net, java has a similar thing:

Locale[] l = Locale.getLocales();

then you just call

getDisplayName()

and voila!

anyway....anyone here know how to do this in .net1.1?

[Plater]

The names of countries change almost daily. It would be rather difficult to have an object built in to .NET to track that.

Just make a datatable full of the most common ones. (Try "borrowing" it from another website) and set it as a datasource?

[r035198x]

Hello People!

Recently i had the need to make a country dropdownlist, ive been searching all over the net, for a way to populate the dropdown from the culture or somewhere.

The thing is all examples i find, either read from a text file, or from an xml file, or from the database.

I just cant believe .net doesnt have something like that, i just think there must be an easier way to populate a country dropdown from a source provided by .net, java has a similar thing:

Locale[] l = Locale.getLocales();

then you just call

getDisplayName()

and voila!

anyway....anyone here know how to do this in .net1.1?

Perhaps something like

using System;
using System.Globalization;
namespace Cultures
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            foreach(CultureInfo info in CultureInfo.GetCultures(CultureTypes.InstalledWin32Cultures)) {
                string culture = info.EnglishName;
                string[] data = culture.Split(new char[]{'('});
                string country = data[data.Length - 1];
                country = country.Replace(")", "");
                Console.WriteLine(country);
            }
            Console.ReadLine();
        }
    }
 
 
    }
 

[Plater]

Well, color me wrong once again.

[r035198x]

Well, color me wrong once again.

A lot of fiddling around if you ask me. Nothing to be proud of.
I hope there's a cleaner way of doing it.

[mikeyeli]

A lot of fiddling around if you ask me. Nothing to be proud of.
I hope there's a cleaner way of doing it.

well, might not be clean(who cares?), but it works, thanks!

[r035198x]

well, might not be clean(who cares?), but it works, thanks!

Erm, I hope you noticed that the method gives some duplicate countries because some countries have multiple cultures. You'd need to add those in a set to remove the duplicates.

[j420exe]

You could consume a public web service that provides the county codes and country name. You will just have to trust or validate what countries they provide in the soap (xml) response.

[mikeyeli]

Erm, I hope you noticed that the method gives some duplicate countries because some countries have multiple cultures. You'd need to add those in a set to remove the duplicates.

yes i noticed, i just did the following:

string culture = info.EnglishName;
                string[] data = culture.Split(new char[]{'('});
                string country = data[data.Length - 1];
                country = country.Replace(")", "");
 
                if( c.Items.FindByValue(country) == null )
                    c.Items.Add(new ListItem(country, country));

[mikeyeli]

You could consume a public web service that provides the county codes and country name. You will just have to trust or validate what countries they provide in the soap (xml) response.

well, im just populating a drop down list, making a webservice for such i think is just too much.

but your suggestion comes in handy for more complicated issues, thanks.