Anyone any ideas? Seems like a bug to me.

Hey Dominic,

It's not a bug, first option is empty to avoid having a value selected by default

This is very non standard. Usually 'Please select' or similiar is the first option? Usually we will validate properly? This looks untidy.

Hi Dominic,

Well you can still make the property mandatory so if the user doesn't select an option you will be able to provide some validation text

As an alternative you could create a custom dropdown type that does have an filled first value instead of an empty one

In my opinion, this is an extremely poor design decision. I've never seen drodowns done this way. 

• Please select
• Option 1
• Option 2

Dominic, How would you even create a custom dropddown type? You can't see any xslt for the forms you create.

2012 Thread but one that shows up high in google searches on this topic. I like to put answers for the next person that comes along...

Either in your theme Fieldtypes overide folder or the default forms theme.. In: FieldType.DropDownList.cshtml

You want to add:

@{
var settings = Model.AdditionalSettings;
}

And then you want to replace:

<option value=""></option>

With:

<option value="">@settings["DefaultValue"]</option>

Then you can use the default value field on the property in the admin to populate and the value still is 0.

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