We do want an additional field that allows a user to select one of the supervisor names, but currently for it to even lookup the supervisors name, the "supervisors namekey" has to be selected first.

So you need to select a namekey before you get the supervisor name, but you want the namekey to display the supervisor name?

I have a hunch that you're using an Oracle data source, so I won't tell you that a stored procedure is the way to go here.

Almost there. We do need to select a namekey before we get the supervisor name, but the supervisor name(s) can be displayed in their own field. I hope this is making sense.

Ok, so really you have a hidden field that you want to display if it contains multiple values? Is the namekey field a single line or a drop-down?

I think we're on the same page now. The namekey field is a single line.

If there's more than one value, they'll get placed in auto-suggestions for the single line field. You can detect that and make the field visible. Here's the basic idea:

$(document).ready(function() {
  //hide the namekey field
  //detect changes to the matched fields that you use to fill in the namekey 

   if ($('.nameKey datalist select option').length > 1) {
      $('.nameKey').show();
    }
});

Thank you for the help with this. The first part should be great, but instead of showing them the namekey field,  I would like to populate a supervisor name field for them to select from so that it is more friendly. Is there a way to do a lookup of the namekeys that are returned to populate a supervisor name field?

Try this:

$(function () {
  $(document).ready(function() {
  //hide the namekey field
  //detect changes to the matched fields that you use to fill in the namekey 

   if ($('.nameKey datalist select option').length > 1) {
      $('.supervisor').show();
      $('.supervisor input').val($('.nameKey datalist select option:eq(1)').val());   // Sets the supervisor field to the second auto suggestion for the given field
    }
});
});

Should do the trick, assuming you meant that the supervisor field is marked with the CSS class name 'supervisor'

Is there a way to get the supervisor name through a lookup without having to get the namekey? Ideally you'd match the employee name and return one or more supervisor names in a drop-down. In the case where there are multiple supervisors, that would probably be easier than getting the namekey and then trying to get the supervisor from the namekey.

I can pull a supervisor name, but it is not unique. This is what is included in each record during a lookup:

So with each employee there is a column for Supervisor Name and Supervisor Namekey. I can only use the Namekey to look up the supervisor's information. I guess another way to do this would be to populate a drop-down list that shows the Supervisor Name and populates the data part with the Supervisor Namekey. Is that possible?