I started with the older posts... looks like you made good progress on your own.
Again - Code really helps... I have no idea what this list.unshift() is or how it's being used.
IF your problem is you want to make sure everything returned back is an array... I wouldn't try to just prepend another value... I would try and convert the single value to an array. An array can hold one value.. I forget how to do that... but googling should get you there. on openntf there are some functions to force an @DbColumn and @DbLookup to an array so that would have an example there as well.
Good Luck!