Picklist Management in SuccessFactors

Picklist Management:

 

What is Picklist?  Drop down Values or smart search list)

Picklists are the lists of values defined in the instance, that you can reference from any of your Corporate Data Models and/or Succession Data Models. Picklists are particularly good at streamlining data and making data entry more efficient. There is some picklist already in your instance. For Example: The job level drop down list which is populated from a list of job levels defined in the job level positions.

Historically, picklists in different SAP SuccessFactors solutions were managed differently

Types of Picklist:

Legacy Picklist

MDF Picklist

Cascading Picklist

Legacy Picklist: Legacy picklists used a CSV import/export tool

MDF Picklist: MDF picklists used Metadata Framework (MDF) tools.

Note: Management of legacy picklists was cumbersome and error prone. To simplify the system and reduce the risk of errors, we introduced the Picklist Center and are migrating all legacy picklists to MDF.

Cascading Picklist: A cascading picklist allows you to define what values will be available in the list, based on the value set for a parent picklist. For example, Country > State > City.

Parent-Child Relationship

Examples:

ñ        Gender:

ñ        Male

ñ        Female

ñ        Country or Region:

ñ        State or Province

ñ        Notice Period:

ñ        1 Month

ñ        2 Months

ñ        3 Months

Download the picklist from help.sap.com Once downloaded import picklist in User Interface System (UI)> Admin Center > Search for the tool called Picklist Center > Create New Picklist > Create Picklist Values. Below is the screenshot.

How to Import Data for Picklist?

On the Admin Center → Employee Files → Import and Export Data.

On the Import and Export Data page, select Download Template as the action to perform.

Select a Generic Object.

If you want the package to be generated as a zip file of all CSV files corresponding to the parent object and related child objects, choose Yes in the Include dependencies dropdown. An Import_Sequence.csv file is also generated, containing information such as the name of the file and the sequence in which the CSV files are to be imported; (Do not change anything in this file)

Click Download. Below are the screenshots.

Whatever the data you Import/Export for the Picklist & Picklist Values, you can check it in the >> Monitor Jobs. Below is the Screenshot.

Note: Since 1911 version, in case you get the error “The number of results loaded in this batch exceeded the limit. Please go to Import Config and reduce the batch size of object ({0}) by half, then try again." => You will need to reduce the batch size in configuration and do the import again.

Select Import Config in the action to perform and insert the batch size (number of different records that will be imported (considering external code + effective date)).

Do the import again. The error should not appear anymore. Below is the screenshot.

What is Purge Type?

In SuccessFactors Employee Central supports two types of load:

FULL PURGE

INCREMENTAL LOAD

When purge type is set to ‘FULL’ during entity record update, Employee Central overwrites historical data for that record and inserts a new record.

For ‘INCREMENTAL’ purge type, only those records that have same Effective Date and Sequence Numbers are overwritten.