Deployment is failing due to "weird" character

Question

Our admin created a new picklist field (Client_Temperature_Status__c) on the Account object and the values added are actually emojis selected using the Emoji Picker on Windows. Here are the values added to the picklist: 😡,😐,😁

We are currently using Azure Pipelines for our deployments and everything was working fine until this new field was added.

We started receiving the following error during our deployments:

Component Failures:
1.  objects/Account.object (Account.Business_Partner) -- Error: Picklist value: %3F%3F in picklist: Client_Temperature_Status__c not found (line 11490, column 18)

Upon a quick investigation, we noticed some "weird" behavior. After retrieving the org's metadata using the "sfdx force:source:retrieve" command, below is the content for the field's xml file. The contents is exactly what we expect.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<CustomField xmlns="http://soap.sforce.com/2006/04/metadata">
    <fullName>Client_Temperature_Status__c</fullName>
    <externalId>false</externalId>
    <label>Client Temperature Status</label>
    <required>false</required>
    <trackFeedHistory>false</trackFeedHistory>
    <trackHistory>false</trackHistory>
    <type>Picklist</type>
    <valueSet>
        <valueSetDefinition>
            <sorted>false</sorted>
            <value>
                <fullName>😡</fullName>
                <default>false</default>
                <label>😡</label>
            </value>
            <value>
                <fullName>😐</fullName>
                <default>false</default>
                <label>😐</label>
            </value>
            <value>
                <fullName>😄</fullName>
                <default>false</default>
                <label>😄</label>
            </value>
        </valueSetDefinition>
    </valueSet>
</CustomField>

The problem begins after converting the source code into metadata api format prior deployment. To our surprise, in the Account.object file generated by the force:source:convert command, here is what we found for every record type we have in the Account object:

<picklistValues>
    <picklist>Client_Temperature_Status__c</picklist>
    <values>
        <fullName>%3F%3F</fullName>
        <default>false</default>
    </values>
</picklistValues>

All record types have actually only ONE value represented for Client_Temperature_Status__c field in the Account.object file, and not the three emoji values like we expected, even though they are added to the record type as per image below:

We know we could use some Ant Task to fix this in our Account.object file prior deployment, but we were wondering:

Anybody has faced this before? Any idea?

Thanks.

Answer 1

It looks like a Salesforce Metadata API bug rather than an sfdx force:source:convert bug. The picklistValues in the retrieved metadata only contain the single %3F%3F value.

Manually constructing the picklistValues and deploying it works:

        <picklistValues>
            <picklist>Happiness__c</picklist>
            <values>
                <fullName>😡</fullName>
                <default>false</default>
            </values>
            <values>
                <fullName>😐</fullName>
                <default>false</default>
            </values>
            <values>
                <fullName>😄</fullName>
                <default>false</default>
            </values>
        </picklistValues>

Nonetheless, I would probably heed Phil W's suggestion to use English API Names for the options and emojis for the labels.