hi jimi. thanks for the reply. no, no real hassles that i can't live with. still making progress with this first form. i've tweaked the templates to suit now so that makes things a bit easier. still not sure about some cacheing/data retrieval issues but that apart, things are looking not bad. hope you have a good festive season...

well finally got the stuff released off to test. some very complex forms and business logic involved but i have to say that the more i persevered, the better tbh architecture was to work with. i still have some reservations about filling objects with redundant data but as i don't cache certain objects, i can fill them with null values where appropriate and only retrieve complete objects when needed. so many thanks jimi, a worthwhile experience and one which i will rollout through the remaining 80% of the application.
now, this stuff about linq and entity wassnames.....?