C, but with simply using a HashMap, or e.g.:

public class ComboBoxItem {

    protected String name;
    protected int value;

    public ComboBoxItem(String name, int value) {
        this.name = name;
        this.value = value;
    }

    public int getValue() { return value; }
    public String toString() { return name; }
}

Object items[] = {
    new ComboBoxItem("Mary", 21),
    new ComboBoxItem("Fred", 17),
    ...
};

JComboBox cb = new JComboBox(items);

...

Object o = cb.getSelectedItem();

if(o instanceof ComboBoxItem) { // implicit check for null
    int value = ((ComboBoxItem)o).getValue();
}

/Thomas

Are you certain you want the getSelectedItem() method to directly
return the code ? Would it be OK if
((SomeObject)getSelectedItem()).getCode() gave you the code ?

If that's acceptable, the solution is simple. Create a class with these
two properties - say "name" and "code" (I'd suppose you probably have a
class already whose properties these are - in which case you don't need
to create one afresh), Override the toString() method to return the
name, Now instead of passing an array of Strings to the JComboBox
constructior, pass an Array of the instances of this class. The default
renderer will call toString() on these objects to display the text -
while getSelectedItem() will return the selected object. (You can now
access the code property after casting it to the correct class)

BK