Populate DropDown from database in an edit view using MVC4 - html

Question

I am new to MVC and trying to populate a dropdown list in the "create" view which is generated from a view model, but it returns with an error saying object reference is not an instance of an object. below is my code :
Controller Code:
public ActionResult Create()
{
return View(new AddRecipeViewModel());
}
Model Code:
public class DifficultyLevel
{
[Key]
public int Id { get; set; }
public string Difficulty { get; set; }
}
public class AddRecipeViewModel
{
[Key]
public int Id { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
public virtual ICollection<RecipeReview> Reviews { get; set; }
public virtual IEnumerable<DifficultyLevel> Difficulty { get; set; }
}
View:
<div>
<select>
#foreach (var item in Model.Difficulty)
{
<option>#item.Difficulty</option>
}
</select>
</div>
Is there an easy workaround this ? as I will be adding more drop downs in this as I go along.
Thanks,
Vishal

Answer 1

not sure if you need to use virtual in your view models.. that's usually only for the entity models. but anyway, try adding a constructor to AddRecipeViewModel and set the collections equal to empty lists so they won't be null.
public class AddRecipeViewModel
{
public AddRecipeViewModel()
{
Reviews = new List<RecipeReview>();
Difficulty = new List<DifficultyLevel>();
}
[Key]
public int Id { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
public virtual ICollection<RecipeReview> Reviews { get; set; }
public virtual IEnumerable<DifficultyLevel> Difficulty { get; set; }
}