Displaying Descriptions In Discoverer LOVs

There's a good thread going on the OTN Discoverer Forum regarding showing full descriptions in Discoverer LOVs. The original question to the group was;

"What I have is an OLTP system with Oracle Forms on top of it. I am implementing Discoverer 4.1 to give the users a adhoc tool.

Now we have code values and what I mean by that is we have the column client.gender and the values are M, F, U. We have a code table that has the valid codes and their corresponding Display value. Such as M = Male, F = Female and U = Unknown.

Now in Forms the users only ever see the display value and we do this by building a record group and attaching it to a pop-list (a windows LOV).

I want to do the same in Discoverer. For example I don't want the users to see the raw data values of M,F,U I want them to see the Display Values of Male, Female and Unknown. The LOV's in Discoverer seem to not be for this purpose but rather a predefined list of values, ie. to save the expense of performing a select DISTINCT everytime.

This problem has to had come up before and there must be a solution. A LOV in Oracle Forms has a code and a "Display to the user value" but the Discoverer tool does not have this. It's almost like Discoverer is not an Oracle product. Also I would like to do this all from the Admin tool, i.e. The users have no idea that this translate is going on."

Some good solutions have come up, including solutions by Shannon Apple and Marcus Chin that use on the one hand custom folders and the DECODE statement, and on the other items classes and functions, to meet the requirement of showing a description in the list of values, rather than just the raw column values. Take a look if you get a moment.