The Unity UGUI Guide on
Dropdowns

This 21-page guide leads you through everything you need to know about Unity’s Dropdown component. You’ll start by creating a  Dropdown in the hierarchy, explore its setup (Label, Arrow, Template, Scroll Rect), and learn how to populate options both in the Inspector and via script—including turning your list into a multi-select dropdown with bitmask flags for advanced selection logic. Clear, illustrated examples show you how to style text-only dropdowns, add images to entries, build image-only dropdowns, customize checkmarks, and set up placeholders for better UX .

Whether you’re building a simple settings menu or a complex in-game selector, this guide packs practical C# snippets, best practices and ContextMenu attributes, to manage values, handle events, and dynamically add, remove, or reset options at runtime. You’ll learn how to decode multi-select bitmasks, subscribing to events safely, and scripting placeholder behavior so your dropdowns feel polished and responsive across any resolution or use case .

Things you will learn:

• How to create and configure a TMP_Dropdown component in your Canvas

• The structure of a Dropdown’s GameObject hierarchy and how to style each part (Label, Arrow, Template, Scroll Rect)

• Adding entries through the Inspector and via C# (single options, multiple options, clearing and resetting)

• Enabling multi-select mode and decoding selection bitmasks into usable indices

• Styling dropdown variants: text-only, text + images, image-only, custom checkmarks, and placeholders

• Accessing and setting dropdown values in code, subscribing/unsubscribing to onValueChanged, and best practices for dynamic UI updates

Contains:

• 21-page PDF Guide with detailed chapters, diagrams, and code samples

• Link to Source Code on GitHub (MIT License)

• Unity Package including an example scene and all scripts, ready to import and experiment with (created in Unity6, v6000.0.41f1)