>Sounds like you need to have an "Unknown" defination in your parent tables. We added a record ID=0 into our CODE table as a UNKNOWN code so all the FK field can have a default value of 0. As long as the business logic knows 0 means undefine, it can handle it correctly.

Well, I actually have some code that goes through the row and seeds default values so that's already the case.

The problem is that if you do this with a PK value the Row knows that it's a PK. If you add two records this way you have a PK rule violation because it's not unique. I've tried to work around this a number of ways, but I can't see a good way to do this generically. THe issue for the most part is that this happens in the guts of the generic business object layer. The value will always be assigned before a save, but right at creation and at addition to the rows collection there may be nothing in the row.