How do I add options to a DropDownList using jQuery?

Without using any extra plugins,

var myOptions = {
    val1 : 'text1',
    val2 : 'text2'
};
var mySelect = $('#mySelect');
$.each(myOptions, function(val, text) {
    mySelect.append(
        $('<option></option>').val(val).html(text)
    );
});

If you had lots of options, or this code needed to be run very frequently, then you should look into using a DocumentFragment instead of modifying the DOM many times unnecessarily. For only a handful of options, I’d say it’s not worth it though.

——————————- Added ——————————–

DocumentFragment is good option for speed enhancement, but we cannot create option element using document.createElement('option') since IE6 and IE7 are not supporting it.

What we can do is, create a new select element and then append all options. Once loop is finished, append it to actual DOM object.

var myOptions = {
    val1 : 'text1',
    val2 : 'text2'
};
var _select = $('<select>');
$.each(myOptions, function(val, text) {
    _select.append(
            $('<option></option>').val(val).html(text)
        );
});
$('#mySelect').append(_select.html());

This way we’ll modify DOM for only one time!