Managing Picklists

You can manage the values that appear in your Vault’s picklist fields and the order in which they appear 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.

Click a field label on the Picklist page and then click Edit to update the picklist’s Label or Name. You can also perform the following actions without clicking Edit:

• Click Create to add a new value to the picklist. This action opens the Create Picklist Value dialog where you can enter the picklist’s label and name and choose its status. Vault adds new picklist values to the end of the list of existing values.

• Use the search field to locate a value in a long list of picklist values.

• Click Reorder to change the order of picklist values by dragging the rows or click Sort A-Z to order them alphabetically. Click Save to confirm the modified order. You must use the API to reorder a picklist with over 200 values.

• Use inline editing to change the picklist’s label, name, and status. You can inactivate values that are in use and it will not affect documents or object records that already use the value. This action applies to Standard and System-managed picklists.

• If there are over 200 picklist values, you can use pagination arrows to navigate through pages of values. Each page holds up to 200 picklist values. When you add a new picklist value to a picklist with over 200 values, navigate to the last page to locate the new value.You can perform these same actions on custom Picklist object fields (Admin > Configuration > Objects > [Object] > Fields > [Custom Picklist Field]).

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

When creating a picklist, 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.

Viewing Picklist Dependencies

A View Dependencies action is available in a picklist’s Details section if the values in the picklist are dependent on values of another picklist. This action directs you to the Picklist Dependency Matrix where you can select a value from the Controlling Picklist and view the dependent values. For example, if you’re viewing the State picklist, you could view the values that are dependent on a value in the controlling Country picklist.

Picklist Limits

The following limits affect picklists:

• A single picklist cannot contain more than 2,000 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.
• End users can select a maximum of 100 values per object picklist field. This limit does not currently apply to document picklist fields, but will be applicable in a future release.

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.