Keeping Value Sets and Order in Sync When Deploying Picklists

When deploying picklist configurations, it’s important to ensure that the map of values and the order list are properly aligned. Specifically, every key in the map should be referenced in the order list, and every reference in the order list should exist in the map. This alignment is essential for a successful deployment and to ensure picklists behave as expected.

Here are a couple of common issues you might encounter:

In a value set, there may be some entries in the map of values that are not included in the order list.

Solution:

Either add these values to the appropriate place in the order list, or remove them from the map if they are not needed.

In a value set, the order list contains references that don’t exist in the map of values.

Solution:

You can either select the required dependencies so the values are included in the map, or remove those references from the order list if they are unnecessary.

This picklist behavior is part of a feature we introduced to support picklist value dependencies. To enable direct referencing of individual picklist values, we store them in a map. However, maps in most systems do not preserve order — and order is often critical for picklists.

To address this, we use a separate order list that explicitly defines the display order of picklist values by referencing keys from the map. For this system to work correctly, the map and the order list must stay in sync.

Before deploying, always double-check that:

This will help you avoid common deployment errors and ensure your picklist values appear in the correct order with the correct dependencies.