Introduction

Universal Picklists are currently an idea on Idea Exchange however a number of people on the Developer Force Discussion Boards have expressed an interest in this functionality and there is currently no development date for the idea. Therefore if you require a workaround before the Idea is developed, this tutorial aims to show you how to create picklists based on a global set of values.

Universal Picklists or Global Picklists like the Industry picklist that is synchronized between Leads and Accounts allow more streamlined administration and greater data quality management, especially for organizations with extensive customizations of Salesforce.com. The implementation in this tutorial also preserves the synchronized picklist values across objects and allows the update of one of the values to update all values in the same way as existing picklists, ensuring data consistency. There are several different ways of implementing a universal picklist, for example the xxx.describe schema could be used however this method would prove awkward when adding new values.

This tutorial shows you how to create a component which mimics the standard salesforce picklist and is populated dynamically by the members of a separate object. A commonly required global picklist is for countries which is the example used in this tutorial although the process described can be replicated for any arbitrary global value required. This tutorial describes a multi-select picklist component however it may be easily modified to a single select picklist.