Extended Views

It seems perfectly sufficient to me, albeit a bit complicated for the example quoted. Could you not just collect the department data through a model call and pass that to the view to generate the select.

It all depends on exactly how the data is to be used and generated, but I would consider writing a helper or library to create the required select data in a more general and reusable way. For instance you may want the departments shown to be dependent on the user role, or training level etc.

Hope that helps,

Paul.