Forms4.5 problem

Can anyone advise me on how to get around a problem that I have encountered in Oracle forms 4.5.

I have a block that is based on a base table, which displays the contents of each record and allows the user to modify the details.

One of the fields (base table) is a status which is held as a character value ('00'-'07'), which has an associated meaning. eg.
'00' = Registered.
'07' = Closed.

I want the users to be able to modify this value without having to know what each value means.

What I have done is to overlay the status field with another field that is not based on a base table item (this field will contain the translation of the status), and created a LOV, that displays the translation of the status, the LOV also updates the contents of the base table field as well as the new field when the user selects a new status.
This works ok, but the new field is only ever populated when the user selects something from the LOV. What I wanted was for the new field to display the status when the form starts, so I created a WHEN-NEW-FORM-INSTANCE trigger and placed some code in it to populate the new field, based on the status value from the underlying table.
The problem is that the user is always prompted to save any changes to the form when they exit (COMMIT_FORM), when they have not made any changes. I am assuming this is because I have populated the new field on startup which has caused the form status to be set to changed.

Is there a way around this problem ?

TIA
Alan

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Alan Campbell
alan_at_mullen.demon.co.uk