I fully agree with jsegal on this, the performance of accessing this small hash twice can't be much. If you have more that a cople dozen entries in the popup it can become unmanageable for the user. I suppose it could be a concern for a heavily laden server though.

It is probably possibe to avoid these steps, but I it would have to be one of two ways:

1. Not using the CGI module, or
2. Using techniques known only to the maintainers of the CGI module

I'll also add that the you hinted at a worry about the load on your DB. That also won't be an issue as you are only sucking the data into the hash once.

Good luck with your app. It looks like you are concerned with proper coding and that can't be bad.

-Kurt