Difference between SelectedItem SelectedValue and SelectedValuePath

Question

What is the difference betweeen the following    SelectedItem SelectedValue SelectedValuePath   All these dependency properties are defined in Selector class  I often confuse SelectedItem with SelectedValue   and SelectedValue with SelectedValuePath    I would like to know the difference between them  and also when do we use them  especially SelectedValue and SelectedValuePath  Please explain their use with some simple examples

User · Answer

Every control that uses Collections to store data have SelectedValue, SelectedItem property. Examples of these controls are ListBox, Dropdown, RadioButtonList, CheckBoxList.

To be more specific if you literally want to retrieve Text of Selected Item then you can write:

ListBox1.SelectedItem.Text;

Your ListBox1 can also return Text using SelectedValue property if value has set to that before. But above is more effective way to get text.

Now, the value is something that is not visible to user but it is used mostly to store in database. We don't insert Text of ListBox1, however we can insert it also, but we used to insert value of selected item. To get value we can use

ListBox1.SelectedValue

Source

User · Answer

To answer a little more conceptually   SelectedValuePath defines which property  by its name  of the objects bound to the ListBox s ItemsSource will be used as the item s SelectedValue   For example  if your ListBox is bound to a collection of Person objects  each of which has Name  Age  and Gender properties  SelectedValuePath Name will cause the value of the selected Person s Name property to be returned in SelectedValue   Note that if you override the ListBox s ControlTemplate  or apply a Style  that specifies what property should display  SelectedValuePath cannot be used   SelectedItem  meanwhile  returns the entire Person object currently selected     Here s a further example from MSDN  using TreeView   Update  As  Joe pointed out  the DisplayMemberPath property is unrelated to the Selected  properties  Its proper description follows   Note that these values are distinct from DisplayMemberPath  which is defined on ItemsControl  not Selector   but that property has similar behavior to SelectedValuePath  in the absence of a style template  it identifies which property of the object bound to item should be used as its string representation

User · Answer

SelectedItem is an object  SelectedValue and SelectedValuePath are strings   for example using the ListBox   if you say give me listbox1 SelectedValue it will return the text of the currently selected item   string value   listbox1 SelectedValue    if you say give me listbox1 SelectedItem it will give you the entire object   ListItem item   listbox1 SelectedItem  string value   item value

User · Answer

Their names can be a bit confusing      Here s a summary    The SelectedItem property returns the entire object that your list is bound to   So say you ve bound a list to a collection of Category objects  with each Category object having Name and ID properties   eg  ObservableCollection lt Category gt    The SelectedItem property will return you the currently selected Category object   For binding purposes however  this is not always what you want  as this only enables you to bind an entire Category object to the property that the list is bound to  not the value of a single property on that Category object  such as its ID property   Therefore we have the SelectedValuePath property and the SelectedValue property as an alternative means of binding  you use them in conjunction with one another    Let s say you have a Product object  that your view is bound to  with properties for things like ProductName  Weight  etc    Let s also say you have a CategoryID property on that Product object  and you want the user to be able to select a category for the product from a list of categories   You need the ID property of the Category object to be assigned to the CategoryID property on the Product object   This is where the SelectedValuePath and the SelectedValue properties come in   You specify that the ID property on the Category object should be assigned to the property on the Product object that the list is bound to using SelectedValuePath  ID   and then bind the SelectedValue property to the property on the DataContext  ie  the Product       The example below demonstrates this   We have a ComboBox bound to a list of Categories  via ItemsSource    We re binding the CategoryID property on the Product as the selected value  using the SelectedValue property    We re relating this to the Category s ID property via the SelectedValuePath property   And we re saying only display the Name property in the ComboBox  with the DisplayMemberPath property     lt ComboBox ItemsSource   Binding Categories              SelectedValue   Binding CategoryID  Mode TwoWay              SelectedValuePath  ID             DisplayMemberPath  Name    gt    public class Category       public int ID   get  set        public string Name   get  set       public class Product       public int CategoryID   get  set        It s a little confusing initially  but hopefully this makes it a bit clearer        Chris

User · Answer

inspired by this question I have written a blog along with the code snippet here  Below are some of the excerpts from the blog  SelectedItem     Selected Item helps to bind the actual value from the DataSource which will be displayed  This is of type object and we can bind any type derived from object type with this property  Since we will be using the MVVM binding for our combo boxes in that case this is the property which we can use to notify VM that item has been selected   SelectedValue and SelectedValuePath     These are the two most confusing and misinterpreted properties for combobox  But these properties come to rescue when we want to bind our combobox with the value from already created object  Please check my last scenario in the following list to get a brief idea about the properties

[wpf] Difference between SelectedItem, SelectedValue and SelectedValuePath

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