Converting field types
In the course of application development, you may want to change the type of a field you have already created. Some fields do allow you to change the data type at any time, as listed below:
Writers: I had to make a judgement call on the
formatting of the list below. Technically, the field types could be uicontrol font because they
are in the UI or code font because they are data types. I decided that either one of these would
make the page too difficult to read, so I chose to view them as general terms and leave them
plain font.
- Text fields can be converted into email, picklist, radio buttons, text area,
or URL fields. When a text field is converted into a picklist or radio buttons, Platform will:
- Analyze the value of the text field for each record of that object type.
- Create values for all unique values found in the text field.
- Replace original text values with pointers to the newly created values.
- Currency fields can be converted to decimal or integer fields.
- Date fields can be converted to date/time fields.
- Date/time fields can be converted to date fields.
- Decimal fields can be converted to currency, percent, integer, or text fields.
- Email fields can be converted to text or text area fields.
- Integer fields can be converted to currency, decimal, percent, or text fields.
- Percent fields can be converted to decimal, integer, or text fields.
- Picklist fields can be converted into multi-select picklist fields, radio buttons, or groups of checkboxes.
- Multi-select picklist fields can be converted into groups of checkboxes.
- Radio buttons can be converted into picklist fields, multi-select picklists, or Groups of checkboxes.
- Groups of checkboxes can be converted into multi-select picklist fields.
- URL Fields can be converted to text area or text fields.
- Auto-number fields can be converted to text area or text fields.
- Formula fields can be converted to expression fields.
- Expressions fields can be converted to formula fields.