how do you add an attribute to the dropdownlist then perform a databind

I created the following codes and commented inline so that you can understand how to bind data to a DropDownList and how to add an attribute to each item in the drop down list (Assuming that, you wanted to add an attribute to each item).

Here is the Drop-Down list in the aspx page:

<asp:DropDownList ID="ddlStatus" runat="server">
        </asp:DropDownList>

And here is the code in the CodeBehind:

public partial class Default : System.Web.UI.Page
{
    //A simple Person class for example
    class Person
    {
        public string Name
        {
            get;
            set;
        }
        public int Id
        {
            get;
            set;
        }
        public Person(string Name, int Id)
        {
            this.Name = Name;
            this.Id = Id;
        }
    }
    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        //Prepare some Person objects

        IList<Person> persons = new List<Person>();

        persons.Add(new Person("John",1));
        persons.Add(new Person("Tom",2));
        persons.Add(new Person("Shubho",3));

        //Specify the Name field of Person object as the text field of an item in the drop-down list
        
        ddlStatus.DataTextField = "Name";
        //Specify the Name field of Person object as the value field of an item in the drop-down list
        ddlStatus.DataValueField = "Id";

        //Assign the persons to the datasource of the drop down list
        ddlStatus.DataSource = persons;
        //Bind the data
        ddlStatus.DataBind();

        //Now, add a "SysCode" attribute to each item in the dropdown list
        for (int i = 0; i < ddlStatus.Items.Count; i++)
        {
            ListItem item = ddlStatus.Items[i];
            item.Attributes["SysCode"] = "Code-" + (i + 1).ToString();
        }

    }
}

And, following is the HTML markup that will be generated in the browser:

<select id="ddlStatus" name="ddlStatus">
    <option syscode="Code-1" value="1">John</option>
    <option syscode="Code-2" value="2">Tom</option>
    <option syscode="Code-3" value="3">Shubho</option>
</select>

I hope, the example codes are self explanatory and you can understand how to implement your code.

I used an example class to bind data (Person). In reality you should retrieve data from the database and bind the data to the DropDownList using some kind of collections of object.