Here's what I ended up with. It appears that the drop down list's items are not yet repopulated when the dataBound event fires, but the dataSource's data is, so I was able to use that. Still seems a bit hacky though.
functionloadCodeDropdownList() { varcodeList = $("#CodeDropDown").data("kendoDropDownList"); varoldVal = codeList.value(); if(oldVal != null&& oldVal != "") { codeList.one("dataBound", function(e) { vardata = codeList.dataSource.data(); varnewVal = ""; for(vark = 0; k < data.length; k++) { if(oldVal == data[k].Code) { newVal = oldVal; break; } } codeList.value(newVal); if(newVal == "") { codeList.trigger("change"); } }); } codeList.dataSource.read(CodeDropDownData());}