ok here "Pastduetime" is the column in the DB. on edit it becomes a dropdownlist. the values of the list come from "TimeOfYear" which is in another table. the function GetCategoriesTime returns the dataset for the dropdownlist. in your case you can use the above code and in the function, find out which item has been selected for the 'Department' and get the values from the db based on that. you can use the same code for both the dropdownlists. only the code in the function would change. for the department - dropdownlist , you can do a normal query to the db and pull up your depts. for the members -dropdownlist, you can query the db based on the item selected from dept dropdownlist. HTH.