Showing posts with label picklist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label picklist. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Issues with deleting a picklist option from a Picklist attribute

CRM allows you to add/update/delete the picklist options of a picklist attribute. However, like most other contact managers that store the text/reference of the deleted picklist option in the records where it had been used, CRM does not store the reference. It differs in this regard. Once a picklist option has been deleted, all existing records that had used this value would be reset to “Default Value”.

While checking out the picklist option sequencing in detail to explain it to our customer we found that CRM by default will always bring back the value of the deleted option.

Here we take an example of Contact record and “Lead Source” picklist attribute.

1. We have added a pick list value with name “Test” in lead source picklist.

2. Now we have selected the test option in a contact record.

3. Now we go ahead and delete the “Test” option from “Lead Source”..

4. If you go back to the contact record that had this value assigned to it, it would now have been reset to “Default Value”


Now unless you save this record, it would automatically get the next option that you add with the same “Value”.

Another point worth mentioning is that if you had deleted one of the picklist options and published the customizations, the next time you add a new option to this picklist it would bring back the value of the deleted option. The value is editable in CRM 4.0 so make sure you change this value unless you were adding this as a replacement to the earlier deleted option.


Now we have deleted the test and publish the entity.

In below screen shot we are adding a another picklist option “Test123”, it will bring up the same value as that of “Test” the deleted option.



Now even if we edit the value and set it to say 200002, any further options that you add do not increment automatically to use the next sequence number i.e 200003 but rather would still bring up 200000 as the value by default for every new option that you add hence forth.

I am not sure if this is a feature or a bug, but I would rather have preferred it remember the last sequence number assigned and increment it from there on.

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Sorting a CRM view by a Picklist Attribute causes an error

One of the best features of CRM is the ability to create your own views and be able to sort on any column of the view as and when you wish without having to redesign the view.

While this works great with all types of entities and attributes, we once came across with a bug when we tried to sort the view by the Status Reason Column. Status Reason column is a picklist type of attribute.

Upon further research we found that this fails for any Picklist attribute and only when one of the records present in the view has a null value set for the picklist attribute on which you are sorting the view.

To search for such null value records, you can look for the “Does not Equal” condition and select all the available picklist options.

You can just open this record and reset the value of the status reason and now the sorting on this attribute will work just fine.