title: From the view, can I get a SelectList's value and not its position in a DropDownList?
body: <p>Let's say I've got a list of Employees with Employee IDs. In the Create View of the controller, I have:</p>
  
  <pre><code>public ActionResult Create()
  {
      ViewBag.EmployeeList= db.Employees.ToList().Select(x =&gt; new SelectListItem
      {
          Value = x.EmployeeID.ToString(),
          Text = String.Format(x.FirstName + " " + x.LastName)
      });
  
      var quote = new Quote();
      return View(quote);
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>(sidenote: I'm pretty sure I've implemented the SelectList inefficiently in my code by defining <code>new SelectList</code> again in the Create View)</p>
  
  <p>Then in the Create View itself:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;div class="form-group"&gt;
      @Html.LabelFor(model =&gt; model.EmployeeID, htmlAttributes: new { @class = "control-label col-md-4 employee-list" })
      &lt;div class="col-md-8"&gt;
          @Html.DropDownListFor(model =&gt; model.EmployeeID, new SelectList(ViewBag.EmployeeList, "Value", "Text"), new { @class = "form-control employee-list" })
          @Html.ValidationMessageFor(model =&gt; model.EmployeeID, "", new { @class = "text-danger" })
      &lt;/div&gt;
  &lt;/div&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I want to write a JS/JQuery function that gets the value of EmployeeID when the selected Employee changes. At the moment this just gives me the option number:</p>
  
  <pre><code>$(document).ready(function () {
      $('.employee-list').change(function () {
          console.log($(this).val());
      });
  });
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The purpose here is that I want to use the EmployeeID to populate another DropDownList field in the Create View, such as "Assign to Manager". A Manager would have a list of EmployeeIDs, and an EmployeeID could be assigned to multiple Managers. After selecting an Employee in the Create View, JS would be used to grab the EmployeeID, send it to the backend, query the Managers table for where it's found, return that list of Managers to the JS, and then plugged into the HTML of the page.</p>
  
  <p>It's possible that a subset of the Employees would be used in the DropDownList, with, for example, EmployeeIDs of [3, 5, 11, 15], so I can't just subtract 1 from the option number to get the EmployeeID.</p>