As a Salesforce Admin, you’ve probably dealt with picklists a lot. Last year, we released a new feature called Global Picklists to help Admins manage their picklists (if you haven’t learned about that yet, go here). Almost immediately after the Global Picklists feature was released as a Pilot program, a new idea appeared in the Success Community to allow existing picklists to use global value sets. The idea crossed 10,000 Idea Exchange points in less than a year and became one of the fastest-growing ideas of all time. We clearly couldn’t ignore it!
With the new Salesforce Lab App, Picklist Field Merge, now available, administrators have the ability to automate key steps required to move existing custom fields to a global value set. And, while we were not able to cover all of the scenarios admins might have, we hope that this app will be helpful to you.
The merge app allows you to select a field to merge to a global value set. It creates all of the missing values in that global value set, based on the field you provide. It would create a new custom picklist (or multi-select picklist) field that references the global value set and updates all of the records, so values in that field will match values in the original field. At the end of this process, a new trigger will be created to ensure that when a value in the original field on the record is changed, the new field on that record is also updated.
When the merge process finishes, you can validate that everything is correct, update all of the references of the old field to the new one, and delete the old field.
Before an admin can start using the Picklist Field Merge app, you need to do two simple steps:
Once the app is installed, admins can use it right out of the box. Simply navigate to the Picklist Merge tab to start using it.
Let’s take a look at the screenshot below.
These are the fields an admin needs to fill in:
These are the modes of operation, one of which needs to be selected:
Watch a video recording from a live demo we had, where you can find more details about UI and the whole process of merging picklists in general.
While this app is a huge time-saver for admins, there are still a few things that it cannot do. A newly created field won’t be added to any of your page layouts where you used to have your old field. You have to add it manually. Also, by default the new field won’t be visible and you’ll need to set up appropriate field-level security settings. The last thing you will need to take care of are dependent picklists – for dependent picklists you have to recreate those dependencies once the field is merged.
We hope that with this newly released app , the process of migrating existing picklist fields into global value sets is significantly simplified! Please share your feedback and comments with us in our Success Community group.
In my role as Lead Admin Evangelist on the Admin Relations team, I have been dedicating my time to not only learning Agentforce but also building agents and creating demos for Awesome Admins to adopt Agentforce at their organizations. Through the process of building, testing, and refining, I’ve gained some valuable insights that all admins […]
Have you ever wished you could give your users exactly the right guidance at just the right moment? That’s the magic of Next Best Action! Whether it’s helping a sales rep spot the perfect opportunity for a follow-up or guiding a service agent with a recommended solution, Next Best Action allows you to create custom […]
As an Awesome Admin, it’s probably in your nature to look for any way to optimize a process or situation! As part of that never-ending desire for optimization, I would bet that you’ve spent a lot of time thinking about your permissions setup in Salesforce. Salesforce provides multiple ways to grant permissions to users, each […]
