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When creating new view for listing objects within standard Salesforce I can set the filter criteria. It is possible of course to filter by some picklist value. The value can be entered manually or with lookup-like chooser. Then, when I manually enter some value that is not predefined, I get the Error: Picklist value does not exist.

But, when I set the same picklist filed with some non-predefined value from APEX, say abc, then I can insert abc as the value in filter section when creating a view and get no errors. However it is still not present in the chooser.

I'm sure it's not a bug but I'm wondering what is the reason of such behavior. I found it a little bit confusing.

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Fields of type picklist are designed to coerce user input to allowed values; Picklists also make report filter creation more reliable. However, as you noted Apex/API/Data Loader can insert any value into a type Picklist or Multi-Select Picklist field.

I can imagine a few reasons for this --

  • data that starts as type Text and then changed to picklist - without having to force a data migration in advance (or worse, forcing apex code to change in advance)
  • wanting to avoid having api clients fail when they insert values that don't agree with the then-current picklist choices

Once a value for a given record that is not in the picklist is inserted, the picklist for that record includes the new, non-compliant value. This makes sense as that is the value saved in the record

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