Hey Maksim thanks for your reply. Very helpful.
On #1, do you know if there is any way to set the selected item key so that control.getSelectedKey() would not return "" after setting the value?
If not, what you have suggested is a good option and definitely preferable over what I mentioned with substr/regex. Just trying to minimize the code changes as we have several controls/pages already using the .getSelectedKey() method.
Thanks!
Andy