如何设置ComboBox不显示其项目中的字符串的一部分？

Question

Want to keep track of some data for each insertion into ComboBox which data type is string. So I thought it's good idea to merge item text with my data.
However I need a way to hide the data from the items list.

Here is some a simple example of what I want:

"First item text             Data:This was a dog"
"Second item text            Data:This was a girl"
"...item text...             Data:...."

I need to find a solution to hide data from user.
Already tried to set MaxLength of ComboBox to 20 with no success.
Note : I am not allowed to use any other class to achieve this so Stack, Queue won't help

Answer 1

There are two attributes of each item in c# combo box are text and value. set item value to Data you want and text to string you want to display for your user.

mycomboBox.Items.Add(new ListItem("Value To Display", "actual value"));
mycomboBox.Items.Add(new ListItem("First item text", "This was a dog"));

Answer 2

Ok. Lets consider this simple approach:

For i = 0 to n
   set combobox[i] to substring(0, m)

So that every item is just a substring containing the appreciated text to appear.

If the item was "First item text Data:This was a dog" , for example, then this code shows only the part "First item text" : (in C#)

string str = "First item text             Data:This was a dog";
string shown = str.Substring(0, str.IndexOf("text") + 4);
string hidden = str.Substring(shown.Length);

And simply handle the SelectedIndexChanged event to update the UI with the data of the selected item.

private readonly string[] data = new[] { "This was a dog", "This was a girl" };

and then show data[comboBox.SelectedIndex]