Simple rules

It's best not to use rules with picklist extensions. PLEs are designed so that you can filter options and send data to the bill of materials without writing rules. Therefore, most reasons to use inclusion, exclusion, and product rules are not present in PLEs. Make sure your use case can’t be completed with typical PLE features before you continue to build your rules.

If you are using selections in a PLE to drive actions, make sure to note the difference between the Equals and Contains operators.

• Equals checks whether the selection in the PLE exactly matches the condition’s value.
  • It can be used with both single-select and multi-select picklists, but it is recommended to be used with single-select PLEs since it is the closest to what users usually imagine the functionality would be.
  • If you are using a multi-select in the condition, if the user makes multiple selections, the condition will not be met if using equals.
• Contains checks whether the selection in the PLE includes the value described. This is the recommended operator for multi-select PLE fields.

For example: A user creates a multi-select picklist field with four options.

Suppose the condition of a rule (in this case, a determination action) is set to fire if the multi-select field equals multi option 4.

If the end user selects only multi option 4, the rule fires:

If the end user selects multi option 3 and multi option 4, the rule does not fire:

On the other hand, if the condition is set to fire if the multi-select field contains option 4, it fires in both instances.

How PLE filters interact with exclusion rules

Picklist extension filters act in the same way that simple inclusion rules work, except that when the defined filter fields are empty, no options are included instead of all options when a simple inclusion rule is not firing.

If you want to have a field that is not defined as a filter in the PLE and that limits options in your PLE field, you need to use a simple exclusion rule in order to further limit those field options, since using an inclusion rule would combine with the inherent inclusion contained in the PLE filter and leave all field options available.

Advanced rules

When using picklists in advanced rules, it’s important to know how these fields appear when referenced using the cfg object. For single-select picklists, the field has the text of the option, but for multi-select picklists, they will be in an array. This difference can often lead to discrepancies when building advanced functions.

Similar to the differences in simple conditions between Equals and Contains, while single-select picklists can be referenced in an “if” statement as:

1 if (cfg.field == "option") {
2 //code
3 }

Multi-select picklists should use the function “Array.includes()” to see if one of the options has been selected:

1 if (cfg.field.includes("option")) {
2 //code
3 }

This function acts on an array and will return true or false depending on whether the array includes the inputted value.

To determine the selections of a multi-select picklist in an advanced function, use the .push() function to add the option. Adding an option that is not defined in the picklist’s fields results in an error.

For other manipulations with the multi-select picklist array in advanced functions, refer to the Help menu’s Array functions. If there are conflicting inclusion and exclusion actions, exclusion actions have precedence.

Additional reading

For an overview of the picklist extension feature, see Picklist extensions.

For a deeper understanding of the back end and how to display PLEs, see Displaying a picklist extension on a layout.

For an overview of the Picklist Extension Pricing enrichment feature, see The Picklist Extension Pricing enrichment.