Ian --- How are you pulling this data over? I would think a view like:

CREATE SQL VIEW vueChildren AS ;
SELECT child.key,child.description FROM parent,child WHERE
child.key = ?parent.childfk

Attached to a Combo as RowSource, this would work fine unless there was an ungodly number of child records per parent.

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>I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction for displaying and validating foreign data that is based on a surrogate key.
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>All of the tables in the system that I'm working on have hidden primary keys. All foreign keys obviously point to the surrogate primary key of the foreign file.
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>I need to know how best to display a field from the foreign file, based on the surrogate value. At the moment we are using combo boxes, but these can be slow, especially if there is a lot of data. Also, there are occasions where the foreign key needs to be a subset of the possible values, making for a potentially complex SQL statement.
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>Has anyone got a strategy for using text boxes to do this? The solution needs to work in grids as well.
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>PS Using VFP 5.0a
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>Thanks for your time,