<p>I would like to declare a dropdown box in a view in an ASP.NET MVC application, for letting the user select a lookup value. I know how to declare plain text boxes but is there an official helper for declaring dropdown boxes (date time pickers and the rest)?.</p>

<p>I also don't know what structure I should pass to my view for giving the values to the dropdown box. I assume I need both an id and a description.</p>

<p>Finally, how do I pass the selected id from the dropdown box back to my action in the controller?</p>

You might check out this blog entry by Scott Guthrie about
Handling Form Edit Post Scenarios
. He uses a drop down list in an example of his.
You can provide a list of complex objects to the drop down list too (Scott Guthrie's example doesn't show that, but it alludes to it).
You can do something like this...
```
```
<%= Html.DropDownList("Select One", "CategoryId", ViewData.Model.Categories, "Id", "Name", ViewData.Model.SelectedCategoryId)) %>
```
```
"Id" and "Name" refer to properties on your ViewData.Model.Categories list of objects.
If SelectedCategoryId has a value, then it will default the dropdownlist.