And yes, passing the name of the possible selected value might be a good idea ... but if you always rely on a primary key and you always call it the same (such as simply id), then you circumvent that problem.

well, that's part of the issue. the database is inconsistent, and without spending a week trying to graft a better solution onto a third-party datasource *and* a 'legacy' MySQL system, i'm stuck passing the key field name.

and i don't know why i disagree with passing SQL statements around ... it just ... i dunno ... seems to me like it starts to turn into an unmaintainable spaghetti monster. sure, i'll be able to debug it tomorrow, but what about the next guy, or even me 6 months from now ( w/out looking at the code, i might as well be 'that new guy' ).

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