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Set forth dropdown field

[Music] you can see i've got a text input and the gallery showing some items from the cds and the submit button but i've decided i also want to add a drop down so let's go ahead and do that okay there's our drop down and i want to populate this drop down with some external data now in my case i'm going to connect this to a cds entity but you could be connecting it to azure an azure table or most likely a sharepoint list so let me go ahead and connect that to my data connection we hit play there we go i've got i can see all my australian cities now you might have noticed something happen when as soon as i connected that to the external data it um obviously it populated the drop down but it also selected the value in the drop down to be the first item coming from the external data typically you would like to have either a blank entry or or maybe a default entry being something other than the value that you're going to select in the drop down so in my example with australian cities i would probably like to either have the first item showing all the default value for that drop down as being blank or maybe you know i usually like setting it to something like select dot dot dot now when you're connecting a drop down you can't do that by default it just automatically populates this drop down with values from the external data and there's no way to set a default value of blank for this drop-down list you know we can set a default value over here by selecting something but we can't make it blank it just will always select the first item in that drop-down list now there's an easy way around this so let me show you how to do it instead of hooking this up directly to our data connection we want to connect it to a collection so we need to set the collection up first and then we will hook up our drop down to it in here i like to normally do that well good place to do that is on upload so go up and do a clear collect that's how we establish a collection and we want it to be connected to our well we want the collection to be called let's just call it our cities and the data we're going to populate that from is our data connection and we just want the name field quickly run that now in here instead of our data connection let's just put our collection in there and yep we still have our values and it's still doing exactly the same as before like we're not seeing any we just we've just got the options that are coming from the data connection so if we go back to our app now what we need to do here we need to establish the collection first before we populate it with the external data and that gives us an opportunity to create the first entry in our collection now we need to one of the things you need to do is you need to line up the columns so when we're creating the collection we need to create the collection with the column name that's coming from the data connection and an easy way to do that if we go file collections we can see our collection that we've created here and our column name that is being populated now if you remember i just i when i hooked up the collection here if we go back to the collection i chose name field and because you're seeing something a little bit different in in the way this is showing up because this is coming from the cds and cds prefixes the column with this value here but in your if you're using sharepoint or azure you won't be seen as prefix you'll just be seeing the column name the other thing that the cds does is it lowercases everything so this is crd 96 underscore name and that's our column name so if we go back to our clear collect let me get rid of that and add a record in crd 96 underscore name which is our column name and the data we want to populate that with is select now if i run that can see our drop down is now showing select which is great but we've lost all of our values coming from our external data source so if we go back to app and we want to do a next step here we want to just do a collect we're going to add a new entry into this collection and the new entry or entries are going to be coming now from drain cities name field we run that again click play and now we can see all of our values but we also have as the first option select we can even go one step further and make sure that that is always the default value for that control hey hit the like button if you liked this video comment something in the comments section below and of course subscribe to stay up to date with all my latest videos i thank you so much for watching i'll see you in the next video