InfoPath Dev

Hello, I'm hoping to get some advice/insight on how to handle this problem.

I have create a "request management" form for our datacenter. This form has to be filled out in order to have equipment racked in the datacenter. One of the fields is a dropdown list of Vendors (Dell, HP, etc). What I'd like to offer the person filling out the form is the option to either choose from the dropdown, or type an entry in. The reasoning here is that someone may have a server to rack, but we haven't yet racked a server from that Vendor. I still need them to tell me the vendor name, but it won't be in the list yet.

Does that make sense? If I were designing a typical web page I could do it with some Javascript magic, but I'm trying to keep things as simple as possible here... anyway, I don't need an entire solution, but if some of you gurus could give me some ideas on how to handle this that would be great. I may just end up putting a second text field in there, with some sort of rules in place to submit differently if that text box is populated.

Anyway, thanks for reading - hope you guys have some better ideas!

I do this by having a 2nd field that is hidden via conditional formatting unless someone selects "Other" from the main dropdown list.  If someone selects "Other," then I make the text box visible and require it to be filled out using conditional formatting on my submit button.  Then, with my workflow, I check to see if this "Other" field was used and notify myself or whoever manages the list that provides the selections in the dropdown.

That sounds like a pretty easy enough approach. I get my dropdown data from an embedded xml file that's generated from a database script I run every now and then. Regardless of whether I turn that into a web service query against the database, or keep it as an embedded XML, I should be able to prepend "Other" to the top of the list. Thanks!