Hey, glad to be of help....

But actually, there can be invalid valid values. Look at your example below:

1 - White
1 - Asian

Duplicate values by definition are invalid. The question is, which one is valid, and which one is invalid..... Is 1 white or is 1 asian. Better yet, what if somewhere else in the data 2 is white and 1 is asian, and then somebody enters 1 for white.

I don't know how you would be able to perform reliable data anaysis without keeping lookup values like this to some standard.....


>There are no invalid values. The user could have anything they want in the race/gender fields. They just need to tell us what those values are. That is what the combos are for. You bring up a good point about checking for duplicate values. I don't check to see if the user puts in:
>1 = white and
>1 = Asian
>
>I think I'll go do that now thanks.
>
>>It seems to me that the gender/race fields are fairly important in your >database. If you don't have a static list to validate against, how do you know >when you encounter either an invalid value or a duplicate value.