I'm about to create a value list for a dropdown. I know that I'll be adding to it. Will this work? How well will assigned values carry through if the list grows and if the order of items in the list changes? Anything I should do now to make the list more gracefully dynamic?

Anything I should do now to make the list more gracefully dynamic?

Don't let the list get very large. You haven't said what the value list will contain but you can usually predict whether it'll ever be more than 30-40 items. If so, you should use a portal instead or consider using the value list in conjunction with another one (as a conditional value list combination) to constrict the list down.

Good point about length. What I'm indexing are literary quotations and I'm trying to group them in to categories. Sounds like a main category > subcategory structure might work best. I've got more than a dozen categories set up to start, and each of those could have up to 10 or so subcategories. Where should I look to figure out how to do this?

There are many examples of Conditional value lists and you can do a search for various ideas. here is one of the more recent which shows the best method (although I haven't tested it myself). You would consider your Category to be the City and your Sub-Category to be the State.

UPDATE: I should explain ... check out the relational graph on how it's connected. And then check out the two value lists involved (city and state). Pay particular attention to the state vl and how it looks for 'only related' values. The reason I've hesitated in endorsing this method is because I'm not convinced that State should be attached to Contact at all; and not just attached to City. From what I can tell, the results are exactly the same. But follow Comment's example because I'm pretty sure I'm wrong on it. It just strikes me as strange.

Edited October 23, 200718 yr by Guest
Added update

I'm not convinced that State should be attached to Contact at all; and not just attached to City. From what I can tell, the results are exactly the same.

I guess I'm still not getting your point on this. Can you post a demo so we can try and find a difference in behavior? Note that in that thread there were three selections to make, not just two - and most importantly, the second selection's values weren't unique.