Dear Dieter, Thank you for answering my Formulator question. I am a little unclear on your answer. If I may I would like to ask it more clearly. In a DTML document, I have the following code to render the field "company_contact_id" which is an integer, and its label, inside a table for formatting: <tr> <td><dtml-var "profile_form.company_contact_id.get_value('title')"></td> <td><dtml-var "profile_form.company_contact_id.render(_['company_contact_id'])"></td> </tr> In this case, the field in the database is called "company_contact_id", and that is also what I named it in Formulator. In your example you said: <INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" NAME="sex_code:int" VALUE="<dtml-var sex_code null="">"> I have read the database record before I display the page and I have the values in the record, I am able to display other "fixed" fields. I am not sure how your example fits with pre-setting the Formulator field on display. In other Formulator fields, including the database field name as (_['company_contact_id']) works to preview the value from the database record. But in the case of the list field, it does not work. Are you suggesting that I should create a hidden field and assign it the value I want to select -- and then refer to that hidden field as the default value of the Formulator multiline widget? Does the Formulator rendering code understand how to do that with a multilist field? Thanks for your help. David ======================================= David T. Washburn DWashburn@AmInfo.com Amherst, MA USA 413 256-3103