How to expose a hidden field in Siebel list applet?

This is a very simple requirement that I am talking about today, where on a button click you are required to do a GetFieldValue() of a active BC field, which is NOT exposed on the UI and doesn't have the Force Active property checked. If you try to do that, system prompts an error sayng:

A script failed to get the value for field <field name> because the field was not active.(SBL-EXL-00119)

So the basic solution anybody can tell is, "why don't you expose the field on the applet with HTML Type = Hidden?"

Well, this sounds very simple and works fine also, but ONLY in the form applet. So in a form applet, if you expose a field with HTML Type = "Hidden", then it will not be visible to the user and you can easily do GetFieldValue of that field. But the same thing doesn't work if it is a List Applet, even if HTML Type = Hidden, the list column would be visible.

The only workaround I found was, set the HTML Type = Hidden and instead of exposing the field as the list column, expose it as the control i.e. expose at any empty placeholder where you can expose buttons/labels etc. It works fine.