Load all the Country Names of the World in DropDown

thatraja

4.94/5 (11 votes)

Mar 29, 2011

CPOL

24743

DescriptionT...

Description

This shows how to bind Country names in DropDownList & also it contains some advantages.

Code

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head   runat="server">
    <title>Bind Country names in Dropdownlist</title>
</head>
<body>
    <form id="form1"   runat="server">
    
        <asp:DropDownList ID="ddlLocation" runat="server">        
    
    </form>
</body>
</html>

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls;
using System.Globalization;
using System.Collections;
using System.Text;

public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page 
{
    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        ddlLocation.DataSource = CountryList();
        ddlLocation.DataTextField = "Key";
        ddlLocation.DataValueField = "Value";
        ddlLocation.DataBind();
    }

    public SortedList CountryList()
    {
        SortedList slCountry = new SortedList();
        string Key = "";
        string Value = "";

        foreach (CultureInfo info in CultureInfo.GetCultures(CultureTypes.SpecificCultures))
        {
            RegionInfo info2 = new RegionInfo(info.LCID);
            if (!slCountry.Contains(info2.EnglishName))
            {
                Value = info2.TwoLetterISORegionName;
                Key = info2.EnglishName;
                slCountry.Add(Key, Value);
            }
        }
        return slCountry;
    }
}

Advantages

Here, Country names are loading from code behind so we can apply some filter/restriction for the items list here.(Example: Loading European countries, Loading Country names starts with 'A', etc.,)
Here TwoLetterISORegionName is used to DataValueField for DropDownList but we can use other things such as ThreeLetterISORegionName, NativeName, ISOCurrencySymbol, GeoId, CurrencySymbol, etc., from RegionInfo class
We can sort the Key field because SortedList was used here