Cascading kendoDropDownList, get selected text in first dropdown

Question

I'm fairly new to Kendo UI and got the basics for my code here : http://demos.telerik.com/kendo-ui/dropdownlist/cascadingdropdownlist

I got 2 api calls, where the first take no parameters and return a list if items (Id, Name) The second api call take in an Id, and return a seconds list of items (also just an object with Id and Name) From this I want to have 2 cascading kendo dropdowns. However my problem is the second one's url always have the id being null or empty, and I cannot figure out what is the right syntax:

            // First dropdown, all good
            var controllers = $("#Controller").kendoDropDownList({
                optionLabel: "Select controller...",
                dataTextField: "Name",
                dataValueField: "Id",
                dataSource: {
                    serverFiltering: true,
                    transport: {
                        read: "/SharedData/GetControllers/"
                    }
                }
            }).data("kendoDropDownList");

            // second dropdown, always hit the api method with the id being null or empty  (depending on syntax for url)
            var actions = $("#Action").kendoDropDownList({
                autoBind: true,
                cascadeFrom: "controllers",
                cascadeFromField: "Id",
                optionLabel: "Select Action...",
                dataTextField: "Id",
                dataValueField: "Name",
                dataSource: {
                    serverFiltering: true,
                    transport: {
                        // HELP:  need pass id to this route (which is id of selected controller)
                        read: "/SharedData/GetControllerActions/id=" + $("#Controller").data("kendoDropDownList").text()
                    }
                }
            }).data("kendoDropDownList");

Answer 1

I believe the problem is that your datasource only gets set one time - at the time of initialization - and at this time the value of the dropdown is null. What i would do is add a change event on the first dropdown like this:

        var controllers = $("#Controller").kendoDropDownList({
            optionLabel: "Select controller...",
            dataTextField: "Name",
            dataValueField: "Id",
            dataSource: {
                serverFiltering: true,
                transport: {
                    read: "/SharedData/GetControllers/"
                }
            },
            change: function(e) {
               setSecondDS();
            }
        }).data("kendoDropDownList");

       var setSecondDS = function() {
           //initialize your new kendo datasource here
           var dataSource = new kendo.data.DataSource({
               //your stuff here
               transport:
               serverFiltering:
           });

          $("#Action").data("kendoDropDownList").setDataSource(dataSource); 
       }