HI Miley
1. I do not see that we can have a clean implementation with only one control.
2. I will not advocate this. Controls are built so that they have no business logic.
3. this is to initialize the default model of the list to an empty array. You can try initialize it with
list.setModel(new sap.ui.model.json.JSONModel([{
{text: 'Example', value: 'A'}
}]));
Thanks
-D