title: best practices with code or lookup tables
body: <p>[UPDATE] Chosen approach is below, as a response to this question</p>
  
  <p>Hi, </p>
  
  <p>I' ve been looking around in this subject but I can't really find what I'm looking for...</p>
  
  <p>With Code tables I mean: stuff like 'maritial status', gender, specific legal or social states... More specifically, these types have only set properties and the items are not about to change soon (but could). Properties being an Id, a name and a description.</p>
  
  <p>I'm wondering how to handle these best in the following technologies:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><p>in the database (multiple tables, one table with different code-keys...?)</p></li>
  <li><p>creating the classes (probably something like inheriting ICode with ICode.Name and ICode.Description)</p></li>
  <li><p>creating the view/presenter for this: there should be a screen containing all of them, so a list of the types (gender, maritial status ...), and then a list of values for that type with a name &amp; description for each item in the value-list.</p></li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>These are things that appear in every single project, so there must be some best practice on how to handle these...</p>
  
  <p>For the record, I'm not really fond of using enums for these situations... Any arguments on using them here are welcome too.</p>
  
  <p>[FOLLOW UP]</p>
  
  <p>Ok, I've gotten a nice answer by CodeToGlory and Ahsteele. Let's refine this question.</p>
  
  <p>Say we're not talking about gender or maritial status, wich values will definately not change, but about "stuff" that have a Name and a Description, but nothing more. For example: Social statuses, Legal statuses.</p>
  
  <p>UI:
  I want only one screen for this. Listbox with possibe NameAndDescription Types (I'll just call them that), listbox with possible values for the selected NameAndDescription Type, and then a Name and Description field for the selected NameAndDescription Type Item.</p>
  
  <p>How could this be handled in View &amp; Presenters? I find the difficulty here that the NameAndDescription Types would then need to be extracted from the Class Name?</p>
  
  <p>DB:
  What are pro/cons for multiple vs single lookup tables?</p>