Hi, see the attached which contains my original question/suggestion and Tony's response. My main motivation for wanting this is to make it easier to see the references when a subset of the database is presented (without having to follow the nic-hdl cross-references). Such a superset might be an overview of all the objects a given person is registered as contact (either admin- or tech-) for. I have plans to make people more aware of the fact that they are registered as contacts and their roles and responsibilities in connection with this (e.g for the domain objects, where I have my own set of roles and responsibilities I want to make them aware of). I agree that what I am asking for is syntactic sugar, and that "pulling up" the names instead of the NIC handles in the objects could be done by my "database extraction" tool rather than having it implemented in the database. I do however not think that I myself had the idea for the syntax for the reference (in tech-c and admin-c), but I can't think of where I have seen it suggested before. This is merely to suggest the issue and not put too much pressure behind it; I can take "no" for an answer. Oh, yes, while on a bordering issue I probably should mention this (although it is beginning to deviate from the main issue in this letter, modify Subject line if you respond to this): The description of what kind of roles and responsibilities the contact persons are supposed to have are IMHO a bit imprecisely defined. This may be intentionally, but then again it may not. I personally would be happy with a better clarification on this point (I am referring to the descriptions in the documents ripe-50 etc., I'm sorry that I haven't kept track of whether the new database documents are out yet). - Havard