I wasn't insulting you earlier. In theory, you would have no control over the codes used by the application. The user would tell you what they are. However, you do have control and you seem to have your spreadsheet hat on. There are no meaningless or grouping rows in a table in a relational database. In a table, every row is equal to every other row. They are not dependent on each other and order is not relevant. All of those rules sem to be broken here. Something like that would only be seen in a spreadsheet or perhaps a report. If your data has a hierarchy, either you need something like a tree view or multiple controls such as cascading combos, not just one. So, perhaps you should think about rethinking the design.