Custom drop down menu with Values of accounts

Question

I am trying to have user select only specific account as parent account. So here is what the situation is . a custom drop down in visual force page that contains specific account. The user picks one of those accounts and submits the rest of the stuff. that page will be attached to account. so some how I need to get that name and the Account Id of it and put attach it to that ID . any ideas

<td class="data2Col" style="border-bottom:0px;">
                    <select id="BillingUnitType" class="AddressUnitType">
            <option value=""></option>
            <option value='APT'>Apartment</option>
            <option value='BLDG'>Building</option>
        </td>
        </select>

How do I pass the value of Apartment or building to salesforce controller. its a single choice, i am not passing a list

Answer 1

An org could contain many thousands of Accounts so a lookup field may be better. To display that in a Visualforce page your controller exposes an SObject instance that has an Account field (such as Contact) and your page just has this:

<apex:inputField value="{!contact.AccountId}"/>

The UI will present the name but the ID value will be populated correctly.

If you are sure there will never be more than a few tens or hundreds of Accounts you can instead present a select list of all the Accounts:

<apex:selectList value="{!contact.accountId}"
    <apex:selectOptions value="{!accountOptions}"/>
</apex:selectList>

where your controller creates a list of SelectOption objects for all Accounts where the value is the ID and the label the name.

PS

On the changed question, use an apex:selectList with apex:selectOption elements for the options and add a string property to your controller for the value to be automatically stored into.