Question

I have a table Resource with a field Type. Type is a lookup into the table ResourceType.

So for instance ResourceType might have: 1: Books 2: Candy 3: Both

And Resource might have 1: Tom’s Grocery, 2 2: Freds News, 3

It would display as: Tom’s Grocery Candy

Now lets say I am using a databound combobox for the resource type and the third record is deleted from ResourceType, we of course get an error when Fred’s News is displayed. I could simply put a marker in (perhaps an asterisk), indicating that it has been deleted, rather than actually delete it. It shows up as **Both* in the textbox portion of the combo and I am content.

However, I would not want it to show up as an option in the dropdown. Is this too much to ask from databound fields? Must I write my own code to load the drop down?

Answer 1

Simply adding a deleted column was not enough – there had to be a way to see a deleted record in the text portion of a combo box while at the same time filtering out deleted records in the drop down.

In the end, I wrote a custom user control to handle this.