Considerations for Deploying a Descriptive Flexfield to a Sandbox
You can deploy and test the behavior of a descriptive flexfield in the flexfield-enabled sandbox. Use the Manage Descriptive Flexfields task to change the flexfield definition, if required.
When you deploy a descriptive flexfield to a sandbox, the process reads the metadata about the segments from the database. It generates ADF Business Components artifacts for flexfields based on the definition, and stores the generated artifacts in the sandbox.
You can't deploy your changes in value sets, key flexfields, and extensible flexfields to your sandbox. You must deploy them directly to the mainline environment. However, if you're making changes to any descriptive flexfield, you must deploy your flexfield to the sandbox and test your changes before publishing your sandbox. After you deploy a descriptive flexfield to a sandbox, you must sign out and sign back in to the application to see your changes.