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FILIPovAdobe Employee
Adobe Employee
April 23, 2024
Question

Changing SFDC Field Type from Text to Picklist

  • April 23, 2024
  • 2 replies
  • 1793 views

Hello all,

A field in our Salesforce is synchronized through a Connector with a field in the Marketo. That field in Salesforce is a text field but we want to change it to a picklist. I know that Marketo deletes the data in the fields if they don’t match. So just to be on the safe side we will export it and re-import it after we change the field type.
1. How could this change affect the Marketo field and other things using that field?

2. I've read somewhere that typically, Salesforce picklist values will synchronize as text values in Marketo - is this correct?

 

2 replies

Heloise_Briere1
Heloise_Briere1
Level 2
April 23, 2024

Hi there!

 

The Picklist field type doesn't exist in Marketo, it typically is converted into a String field type.

 

The main difference between Text vs String field type is the character limit: 

  • Text field: Longer text. Supports up to 30,000 bytes. Standard ASCII characters use 1 byte per character (allowing up to 30,000 characters).
  • String field: Shorter text, up to 255 characters.

Source: https://developers.marketo.com/rest-api/lead-database/fields/field-types/

 

Also, another big difference between these 2 field types is the filter:

I hope this helps!

Heloise Briere
    SanfordWhiteman
    SanfordWhiteman
    Level 10
    November 18, 2025

    Hey @heloise_briere1 ran across this thread and wanted to correct/clarify a couple of things.

     

    In a nutshell, the limit of a Textarea is actually 65,335 bytes, not 30,000 bytes. The SQL datatype is UTF8MB3, meaning that can hold an absolute maximum of

    • 65,335 ASCII (U+00-U+FF) characters
    • 32,767 2-byte (U+100-U+7FF) characters
    • 21,845 3-byte (U+800-U+FFFF) BMP characters

    As you mix character ranges, the actual capacity naturally goes below 65,535. Characters over the limit are truncated.

     

    However, even when the value is not truncated, some data values cannot be reflected in the Activity Log. That’s where things get tricky: the ActLog has an internal buffer that prevents it from storing new/old values over a certain level, which appears to be ~60,000 bytes. That is, you’ll still be setting the field value, but the ActLog will say the Change Data Value is “Missing history details.” Whether you choose to code defensively and keep values < 60kB is up to you.

    Darshil_Shah1
    Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
    Darshil_Shah1Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
    Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
    April 23, 2024

    @FILIPov, if you have a picklist field in Salesforce that is synced with Marketo, you'd only be able to choose the values defined in the picklist at Marketo's end; otherwise, you'd run into sync errors when this person record tries syncing over to Salesforce. And yes, as @heloise_briere1 mentioned, Marketo doesn't have a dedicated field type called picklist, but any Marketo string field mapped with the SFDC picklist field will behave as a picklist field in Marketo, similar to an unmapped synced SFDC picklist field (i.e., you'll be able to choose values from the dropdown; any other values would result in sync errors as mentioned above).

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