No Readonly for Ajax CascadingDropDown

I have an application with several cascadingdropdowns. These work fine when the page is in edit mode but if I want to simply see what choices were made in each of the dropdowns, I seem to be out of luck. If I disable them, then the selected value does not show up. I cannot seem to make them invisible and use a textbox for the readonly mode. I get errors when I try to make invisible the ddl which is the TargetControlID of the cascadingdropdown. Any suggestions or should I just forget the cascadingdropdown and just use ddl's?