I would use a List<Employee>, but instantiate the appropriate type of Employee and have some virtual methods that you can override to get the custom behaviour for each one.

I've just found out (by accident) that sub-reports in my version of BID do not preview - Once deployed they show up fine.

This did it thanks. apologies for the vagueness, well I knew what I meant. To hopefully clear up any questions - the table can have many thousands of rows each one holds the details of application events used for auditing purposes. There are about 40 event types that are logged (eventid) and the details column holds the data associated with a particular event e.g this one describes a simple page view. Other columns are things like hold details of user ids, timestamps etc but in this instance were not required I jut needed one example of each event type to test a reporting application. Reading that I could have been clearer in my original post. Thanks again everyone.

That's excellent thanks. The change to LINQ is a bit of a paradigm shift and I certainly need more practise! Thanks again for your help. Paul

I'll get back to you later in the week, I'm off site for a couple of days, thanks for your efforts, much appreciated.