combobox tostring() returns object instead of value

Question

I want to retrieve the string value selected in a combo box and convert into an integer, however the SelectedItem method always returns the name of the object. Other posts suggest to use the Content property of SelectedItem but it is not available to me in vs2017 using .net 4.6.1. Can someone help me get the value without parsing the string?

Here's the Xaml followed by the cs file:

<ComboBox x:Name="Combo_BaudRate" SelectedValuePath="Content" 
          HorizontalAlignment="Left" VerticalAlignment="Top" 
          Width="120" Margin="112,81,0,0" 
          SelectionChanged="ComboBox_SelectionChanged" 
          IsReadOnly="True" >

        <ComboBoxItem Content="1200" />
        <ComboBoxItem Content="2400" />
        <ComboBoxItem Content="4800" />
        <ComboBoxItem Content="9600" />
        <ComboBoxItem Content="38400" />

</ComboBox>


private void ComboBox_SelectionChanged(object sender, SelectionChangedEventArgs e)
{
    Selected_Port_Baudrate = Combo_BaudRate.SelectedItem.ToString(); 
}

Answer 1

SelectedItem on ComboBox return the first selected ComboBoxItem.

You want to get the value of a property of the selected item, not the item itself. So you should use SelectedValue in conjunction with SelectedValuePath to bind the property value and convert it to the appropriate type :

int selectedBaudRate = int.Parse(Combo_BaudRate.SelectedValue.ToString());

Note that the underlying type of SelectedValue is string because you specified the ComboBoxItem property Content as the SelectedValuePath.

If you do not set both SelectedValuePath and SelectedValue, SelectedValue will contain the same object as SelectedItem.