What is the elegant way to create a relationship using key fields using a popup menu and without showing the key field in the popup?

What I do now is make sure the popup field (drawn from the to-be-related record, say, a product name) is useable as a temporary key and place it in the originating record. This defines a temporary relationship using those two fields. The foreign key field in the originating record is set to auto-enter the other's prime key using the relationship defined by the popup entry and then the key-field relationship is used exclusively after that.

This works but it's a kludge. It requires a field that is only used for that purpose and that field winds up duplicating data in another table. It also exposes the link for a brief time to all the problems that come with not-necessarily-unique link fields.

Is there a more-elegant way to make that link using a popup without showing the key value (yuk!)? I'm sure this has been answered somewhere in this forum, but my searches either came up empty or found more than I could wade through.

You can have two fields in the popup (the key and the descriptor, say); you can then graphically "hide" the key; maybe Lee can find a forum reference or two for how to do this.

you can then graphically "hide" the key;

How would I do this? I don't want the user to have to see the key at all. Certainly not on the layout but also not in the popup.