Custom Classes and DropDownList Web Controls

[Chitty]

Hi All,

Hope someone can help me out on this one, it's been driving me around
the bend.

In essence I'm trying to replicate a custom class hierachy relating to
my problem domain database. The actual domain I'm working on is
irrelevant, so I've been playing with two noddy classes; Person and Pet
(the full code can be found here:
<http://www.junge.f9.co.uk/code/CustomClassDDL.zip>).

The notion is a Person has a Pet, so the Pet is a property of the
Person object. However when I try and use this relationship against a
DropDownList I can't figure out how to get it to work, as in:

Pet moDino = new Pet(1, "Dino", 4);
Person moFranz = new Person(99, "Mr", "Flintstone", moDino);

ArrayList marrPeople = new ArrayList();

marrPeople.Add(moFranz);

ddlPeople.DataValueField = "Id";
ddlPeople.DataTextField = "MyPet.Name";
ddlPeople.DataSource = marrPeople;
ddlPeople.DataBind();

I've also tried variations like:
ddlPeople.DataTextField = "((Pet) MyPet).Name";

but still didn't get anywhere

I just get the error "DataBinder.Eval: 'Person' does not contain a
property with the name MyPet.Name."

However I know I can do this in a datagrid by casting in the
DataBinder.Eval in the HTML view, but can't figure the equivalent for
the code behind

Any help much appreciated