Ken;

Just to be the devils advocate – you could use two RV’s one for doomahickey
and one without. Let the user input data drive which RV would be used. Ugly but what the heck! If you like RV's nothing is impossible and who knows what approach lies behind a clients application?

Lots of good posts and ideas on this thread and should get developers to look at how and why they approach handling data in any particular manner. Some developers will not care and others may start evaluating what they are doing.

Tom