MSCRM2011 Custom Values in OptionSets

Question

CRM 2011 warns when changing the value of a global option set entry from its predefined solution-based value.

What's exactly the issue with setting a custom value?

Answer 1

The warning is just telling you that changing the underlying value could break existing code since javascript, plugins, workflows, etc that reference that optionset item by value and not name would cause it to break.

If you're confident it's not going to break anything I would ignore it.

When your CRM system becomes large/complex with lots of entities and external code, the warning is more appropriate then.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

What Jon said, just make sure you're not referencing any option set values by the underlying value. A not so obvious thing to check when you're changing the values of option set items is the default selected values that you might've had assigned for a field that uses that option set.

Say you had a field "Selection" that used an option set "Options" where "Options" contained options "Yes", "No" or "Maybe". If you set the default value of "Selection" to be "Yes" but then changed the underlying value of the option "Yes", then the default value of "Selection" will be removed. If you look at the customizations.xml you'll see that the underlying option set value is stored, not the text.