Brian,

How did the drop down list work out for you?

I have run into a similar need in my application to display user friendly names in my grids instead of the ids. In my case, I did not want to use the drop down list because my grids are read only. I'm assuming you are binding the drop down list to a MM BO, essentially performing a join using the drop down list and the parent BO.

As an alternative, I created a "select "stored procedure that joined the tables containing the user friendly names based on the defined foreign key relationships. Then I created a method in the BO to execute the stored procedure and return a dataset. This works well because now I just have to call the new BO method to populate the BO with user friendly data which is of course bound to the grid.

Unfortunately, manually creating the stored procedures are a pain in the neck and will become a maintenance issue when changes occur to the database and the MM BLG needs to be rerun.

I've been thinking about extending (or better yet putting in an enhancement request to Kevin) the BLG to automatically generate these stored procedures to include the joins for all defined foreign keys and then create the appropriate BO methods to execute these stored procedures.

I would appreciate your thoughts on this approach.

Al