The last solution actually works great. Thanks. The problem I was having was not fully understanding the entity object. Since I didn't have the fields defined in the default entity, I wasn't seeing the referenced fields. So I decided to standardize on adding a description field for each coded id in an entity. This way the value is null when I don't need it, and it will contain values when I use a different shaped entity.

I am considering the possibility of maybe re-instantiating another instance of the business object using a different entity from the default for the object by maybe passing a value to override the creation of default entity and instead use the list entity.