SelectionFactory fun in Episerver - Part 1

Drop Down lists are a common request and question in the Episerver world, for anyone fairly new to the platform. That's because Drop Down lists are a great way to provide users with a straight forward interface for providing a value to a property; the options for values are right in front of them. They also make it easier for a developer working with those property values, because they know what the possible values are that they will be working with. Unfortunately, someone new to the Episerver platform might not know the best way to start creating properties with Drop Down lists.

Linus Ekstrom (http://world.episerver.com/blogs/Linus-Ekstrom/Dates/2013/12/SingleMultiple-selection-in-EPiServer-75/) blogged about the basic approach of using SelectOne and SelectMany with predefined values in 7.5, and Joel Abrahamsson (http://joelabrahamsson.com/enum-properties-with-episerver/) and Anders Nordby (https://andersnordby.wordpress.com/2014/10/16/enum-properties-with-selectone-and-selectmany/), along with several others, have written good blog articles about working with SelectOne and SelectMany properties sourced by Enums.

Aside from linking to those articles to familiarize you with the people (they're pretty cool) and the approaches, this article is to help provide additional methods for building out lists for SelectOne and SelectMany properties you want to use Drop Down lists for.

Good products don't save bad service: From building a house to building a website

Last night I was sitting around a small bond fire with some friends chatting about our houses. We just moved into our house last October, after having it newly constructed in this new neighborhood. My friends moved in several months prior to us, and watched the construction of our house, which seemed like it was never going to end. We had the same builder, who provides a 1 year touch-up service as part of their warranty to address any "settling", or shrinkage, and my friends just completed their 1 year follow-up.

The difficulties we both had during construction, and post-closing, were the topic of conversation when one of them asked, "would you build another house with them?" I thought about the question for a minute, because the quality of the house and the layout is something we all agreed was above average. But I replied with, "No, I don't think so. A good product won't save bad service."

After the fire I went home, and the similarities between the construction process of our house, and what customers, developers, and agencies go through for websites prompted me to write this. This is my list of issues you might face, along with some pointers for you when starting a new project, or a new relationship with a customer.