Hello Everyone and thanks for your help in advance. I am developing a class library that reads a SQL Server table of names and ID's. I want to populate a dropdownlist with the data, however, names in the table may appear more than once. I only want to display the name in the dropdownlist once. My initial thought wat to create an arraylist, then loop through each record, adding a new name upon each new name encountered. But I want the name to display in the dropdownlist, but the associated value to be the IDNumber for the particular name. This would be pretty straightforward if I was doing this in a code-behind, simply adding to the list as each record was read. But since this is a separate class, I have to return something that can be bound to the dropdownlist control. I am not eactly sure how to go about accomplishing this. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Your problem is not entiredly clear....

It's sounds like you are asking two separate question here:
1. How do I return a set of data from a class library?
2. How do I restrict the list based on the repeating names?

Question 1:
Retrieve your data using a DataAdapter and a DataSet. This is so you can get a "disconnected" dataset. Once you have that you can return the table you need. (If you have tried using a DataReader, you'll find that you can't return it and close the database connection. The DataReader will be empty. This is due to the way the DataReader interacts with the connection object. That's why you need a DataSet.)

Question 2:
From the way you explain it, I gather that you have a table with Names and IDs. Are all the IDs unique? Is there one name per ID? Why would you want to eliminate repeating names if they have different IDs? For a given set of matching names, what logic would you use to decide which ID to use if you were to eliminate the duplicates?

Peter
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