Adding picklists in the maker portal

It is now possible to create your own picklists, in addition to the ones that are available out of the box. As you may know, picklists are really a simple concept, basically a named list of items with a name and a description; they are mainly used as types of fields. When such fields are rendered, a dropdown box with the display names of the items will appear. 

Picklists are added by using the menu item called Picklists in the “Common Data Service” tab, right under the entities menu. Clicking that menu brings you to a page showing all the picklists that are currently defined in your environment. A lot of commonly used picklists are already defined for you out of the box; those can easily be identified by the fact that their type is “Standard”. The ones you create for yourself are of type “Custom”.

Let us go ahead and create a new picklist by clicking on the “New Picklist” button at the top of the page. From here, a page where you can define your picklist will be opened; you define the Name, the display name and a helpful description for future reference.

The picklist name cannot be changed once the picklist is created, so make sure you get it right! There are a few criteria that must be satisfied for the picklist name: It has to simple, and cannot contain any special characters. Also, you can only have one picklist with a particular names; attempting to create another picklist by the same name will result in an error message. No such restrictions apply for the display name field.

For the sake of this walkthrough, we will be creating a picklist for the where the user can choose the mode of transportation.

Let’s call the picklist “Transportation” and add the required fields:

Pressing the “Next” button gets us to the page where you can provide the different elements of the picklist, in our case the transportation providers. The next page shows a single item already created for you. You should overwrite this to something meaningful for you. The editing is inline; there is no new page for each of the picklist items. Click on the NewItem field in the Name column to add the first item. Any time you need a new picklist element you can create a new row with the “Add item” button located at the top right of the screen. After filling in the items the screen would look something like:

Any item can be deleted by clicking on the garbage can on the right of each item line. When all the required items have been added the picklist can be created (i.e. submitted to the server) by pressing the “Create” button in the bottom right corner. After a few seconds, you will see the picklist added to the list of existing picklists:

The picklist is now ready to be used to defined fields on your entities; Just add a field of type Picklist and use the Display name field in the Properties pane for the field. That’s it! I hope you agree that creating picklists is a breeze.