>Logically, that does not make sense. Why would you show something in a UI >element, such as a combo box, with no underlying value to represent the >display value.

>Please give me a logical reason why somebody would do this.


In the application I'm developing there is hardly any data input. Most of the data is imported from other sources. In this case the application needs to know the gender and race values in the imported data. I wanted to show the user the data in those fields so I fill a combo box with the values from their imported data. I want to account for the case where say they have NO Native American employees. Since the value for Native Americans is not in their database I cannot put it in the combo but I still want them to be able to tell the application what their value for Native American would be if they had any.

Your suggestion to just add the value to the combo once they entered it would work until the combo was requeried at that point the imported data would be requeried for its unique values. I could have made it work I suppose but keeping it out of the combo gives the user a visual clue that the data doesn't exist in their imported data.