populate form with values, what do i use???

hi i have a update form on a page

the form has spry validation and one field has spry and a server validation to check the record is unique.

if i set the default value of the form field to the value from the recordset filtered by the id the correct value shows initially, but if the server validation fails, all the form fields are empty.

so i change the default values to use the values from WAValidatedEntries collection
now when the form initally loads they are empty.

my question is this:
how do i poulate the form with the initial values currently stored in the db when the form is first loaded and then if the validation fails populate the form with the validated entries.

i hope you understand the problem and can gibe me the answer, am sure its something very simple, but the documentation is so basic with very little detaild explanation of anything, and there are so many diffirent collections in the bindings, its not really clear what i should be using.