How to make a dropdown as readonly in html

I encountered a problem where in it was required to make a drop down readonly.

While searching over internet i found THIS
But the solution mentioned there, didn't appeal me much. As i had to make server side code changes while saving the value using the hidden field.

How do we do this? The common thought is to disable the drop down menu. Well, yes, but there's a choice

When you use disabled, it prevents the user from using the drop down, or form element. You can see the year, but it is grayed out. Your mouse can't select or change it, and you can't tab to it with the keyboard. Disabled is used a lot with checkboxes. Sounds like just what we want, but you unknowingly might have caused yourself a small development problem.

The problem is "disabled" does just that. Disabled means that in your $_POST or $_GET that element will not show up in your controller. If you want to use the year in your controller, you won't be able to recover it from that form. All you can do it look at the value on the web page.

What if we want to read the year, prevent the user from changing the year, and recover the year in the form data sent back to the controller. The solution for this is

Make a replica of your dropdown with a different name and different id.

Hide your original drop down with <span style="display:none">
This makes the element available in the form, so it will flow to the server side as well.
At the same time, it will give a look and feel of disabled to the user.

Example :

<span style="display:none">
<select style="width:400px;"  name="agentName">
            <option value="${coltuserprofile.belongsToOcn}">
                  <c:out value="${coltuserprofile.firstName}/${coltuserprofile.belongsToOcn}"/>
            </option>
</select>
</span>
<select style="width:400px;"  name="agentNameDisplay" disabled="disabled">
<option value="${coltuserprofile.belongsToOcn}">
            <c:out value="${coltuserprofile.firstName}/${coltuserprofile.belongsToOcn}"/>
      </option>
</select>