Product PickList on Opportunity Object

Question

My sales team sells a large variety of products from different manufacturers, business requirement is as follows.

A user chooses the first picklist which is

1) Product Type : Values: Refrigrators and Airconditioners

The second picklist has a dependency on first Picklist, if Refrigerators is chosen then

2) Manufacturer: Values: Panasonic, Samsung, LG

The third picklist has a dependency on second Picklist, if Samsung is chosen then

3) Product Name: Values: 185 Ltr Black, 220 Ltr Gray, 220 Ltr Black, 285 Ltr Water Dispenser.

All these picklist values should be derived from Products Object (instead of price books, due to various factors) where records are created using similar nomenclature.

How do I set this up? from a maintenance point of view want to avoid VF Pages or Apex.

Regards Prashant

Answer 1

Considering you will have quite a few Product Names (and that it can grow over the days), which you want to source from the Product object, your best bet here is to use a VF page (if for Classic) or a Custom Lightning Component (if for LEX) for the purpose. VF pages/Custom Lightning components or Apex are not maintenance nightmares as long as you have your requirements right and that you have implemented it following the best practices.

The option of configuring a dependent picklist using configuration only will be only feasible if you have limited number of entries in picklists. You may not want to add say Product Names in a picklist if you know that it can grow in future. This will actually require more maintenance as there may be scenarios where a Product is obsolete and no more available and/or a new Product is added. This all will need a change management to redeploy the picklist fields.

Using anything as a custom implementation with VF/Lightning component will require one time effort but will be more dynamic to any change that occurs on your Product object.