WinForms/C#: Adding items to Combox and controlling the Item value (numeric)

I have been populating my Items to a combox using the designer and all i pass is a string.

Although now i need to control which key/index is stored with each item.

I thought th开发者_开发百科ere was a item object, but i looked at the method ADD and it accepts object..

How do i pass in an control the key/index i.e. what is returned when i do SelectedItem.

So if i do selectedtext i get back a string that is displayed in the current selected dropdown but if i do selecteditem i want to get back a custom number that i need to store with it...

Any ideas how to do this?

Thanks in advance

You need to bind it to a collection of key\value objects and use the DisplayMember and ValueMember properties to set what is displayed/returned.

Heres an example:

public class ComboItem
{
    public string stringValue { get; set; }
    public int indexValue { get; set; }
}

public void LoadCombo()
{
     List<ComboItem> list = new List<ComboItem>();
     // populate list...
     // then bind list
     myComboBox.DisplayMember = "stringValue";
     myComboBox.ValueMember = "indexValue";
     myComboBox.DataSource = list;
}

Then

myComboBox.SelectedText       // will return stringValue
myComboBox.SelectedValue      // will return indexValue
myComboBox.SelectedItem       // will return the ComboItem itself
myComboBox.SelectedIndex      // will return the items index in the list

Alternatively you could store the index by adding a Tag property (which is often used to store things like this) by creating a custom combo item, have a read here for how to do this