Question

Dropdown List place holder text

1

I am trying to show a user placeholder text on a dropdown list. I would like to show a message saying "-Select-" on each dropdown. I figured that I would be able to add it to the enumeration and then check to make sure that the value that is being stored in the database would not be set to "-Select-" through a microflow. I was wondering if anyone had a better idea or if this was a good path to proceed with.

asked 2015-06-16

Jason Bartlett

1 answers

Daniel Schilperoord · Answer 1 · 2015-06-18

The workaround you are proposing will probably work but has some major drawbacks. It breaks validations for required fields and it adds complexity to all your enumerations because you have to check for the 'empty value' everywhere (or use a before commit event handler to empty the value). This gets even more complicated if you also want to do that for reference selectors, which also use a dropdown.

Although it won't help you right now, I think it would be better to have a placeholder property on such widgets, just like the text box, so you can configure the text which is shown when nothing is selected. You could file a feature request, because this sounds like pretty common functionality.