Managing Picklists

The Picklists page allows you to manage the values that appear in your Vault’s picklist fields and the order in which they appear.

In application (PromoMats, eTMF, etc.) and Platform Vaults, you can manage picklists from Business Admin > Picklists. All Admin users can manage picklists.

Picklists differ slightly from other document fields. When you create a new picklist-type document field, the picklist exists separately from the field and can be referenced by other picklist-type document fields. Vault automatically creates a new picklist when you configure a document field as a picklist-type and do not select the option to use an existing picklist. New picklists are named and labeled based on the document field that creates them, but you can change these later.

View and edit the following picklist details in the Details section:

Label
The user-facing value for the picklist.
Name
The unique identifier for referencing the picklist.
Source
The source of the picklist, either Custom (Admin defined), Sample (available by default but editable), or Standard (available by default with limited editing options).
Used In
The document types or object fields where this picklist is used. Click a document field or object field to go directly to its details page.

How to Edit Picklist Values

Changing a picklist value’s label or name affects all existing document or object record metadata. For users accustomed to seeing a particular selection, any changes may cause confusion.

  1. From the Picklists page, click on a field label and then click Edit.
  2. Optional: Reorder picklist values by dragging the rows or click Sort A-Z to order them alphabetically.
  3. Optional: Inactivate a value from the Picklist Status Value column. You can inactivate values that are in use and it will not affect documents or object records that already use the value.
  4. Optional: Rename a picklist value by changing the value label in the text box.
  5. Optional: Rename a picklist name by changing the value name in the text box.
  6. Optional: Add a new value by typing in the text box at the bottom of the screen and pressing Enter.
  7. Click Save. The changes are immediately available for users.

Active & Inactive Picklist Values

Active values appear in the Vault UI and are available for selection on their respective picklists. Inactive picklist values only appear on the picklist edit page in Business Admin unless the value was used on a document or object record prior to becoming inactive, in which case it remains on the document or object record until edited by a user.

Click Show Inactive Values to show picklist values that are inactive. To change a picklist value’s status, click Edit then select a status from the Picklist Value Status column.

How to Copy and Paste Multiple Values

You can copy multiple values from a text document or spreadsheet and paste it into the new value text box in order to add multiple values at once. The values appear on separate lines or separate rows.

Picklist Limits

The following limits affect picklists:

  • A single picklist cannot contain more than 1,024 active values. Once you’ve reached this limit, you will need to inactivate an existing picklist value before creating a new one.
  • Picklist value labels have a limit of 256 characters.
  • Picklist value names can only contain the lowercase letters a-z, numbers zero (0) - nine (9), a single sequential underscore or hyphen, and cannot end or begin with an underscore or hyphen.
  • Each raw object supports a maximum of two (2) multi-value picklists.

Picklist Deletion

You can delete an entire picklist only if it is not referenced by a document or object field. If there is no field referencing the picklist, you’ll see an Actions menu above the Edit button. Select Delete to delete the picklist.

You cannot delete individual picklist values. To hide a value, you must make it inactive.

In some cases, it may be necessary for users to be able to filter by inactive picklist values for reporting purposes. When such a need arises, you can enable the setting Allow deleted picklist values to be used in report filters from Admin > Settings > General Settings.