Thanks to both Peter and Simon, I like both ideas, I guess I'll need to have a much closer second look at our schema and then decide which way I want to go down.
I think that several of the attributes for objects in people is of no concern to most staff anyway, and I need to investigate how access to those fields is locked down. But I guess I could cut the selectable attributes down to maybe a subset of 15 which would be easy enough using a config file as Simon suggested. Thanks again! Cheers, Andrej