Angular js How to populate dropdown with JSON without ng-options
<p>i populate drop down this way and data is coming but no data has been selected when dropdown shown first time. here is my code. please have a look and tell me where i made the mistake.</p>

<pre><code>&lt;div ng-controller="DemoCtrl" ng-app="main"&gt;
&lt;select ng-model="selectedCountry"&gt;
&lt;option value=""&gt;Select Account&lt;/option&gt;
&lt;option ng-repeat="item in chooseCountries" value="item.countryId"&gt;
  {{item.countryId}}-{{item.name}}
&lt;/option&gt;    
&lt;/select&gt;  

&lt;span&gt;Selected country id is {{selectedCountry.countryId}}&lt;/span&gt;   
&lt;/div&gt;

var app = angular.module('main', []);
app.controller('DemoCtrl', function ($scope) {

    $scope.chooseCountries=[
        {countryId : 1, name : "France - Mainland", desc: "some description" },
        {countryId : 2, name : "Gibraltar", desc: "some description"},
        {countryId : 3, name : "Malta", desc: "some description"}
    ];

    $scope.selectedCountry = $scope.chooseCountries[0].countryId;
});
</code></pre>