How Flexfields and Value Sets Work Together
Value sets are specific to your enterprise. When gathering information using flexfields, your enterprise's value sets validate the values that your users enter based on how you defined the value set.
You can assign a value set to any number of flexfield segments in the same or different flexfields. Value set usage information indicates which flexfields use the value set.
The following aspects are important in understanding how flexfields and value sets work together:
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Defining value sets
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Shared value sets
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Deployment
Defining Value Sets
As a key flexfield guideline, define value sets before configuring the flexfield, because you assign value sets to each segment as you configure a flexfield. With descriptive and extensible flexfields, you can define value sets when adding or editing a segment.
Shared Value Sets
When you change a value in a shared value set, the change affects the value set for all flexfields that use that value set. The advantage of a shared value set is that a single change propagates to all usages. The drawback is that the change shared across usages may not be appropriate in every case.
Value Set Values
To configure user-defined attributes to be captured on the value set values in the Manage Value Sets task, configure the Value Set Values descriptive flexfield. The object's code is FND_VS_VALUES_B.This flexfield expects the context code to correspond to the value set code. For each value set, you can define a context whose code is the value set code, and whose context-sensitive segments are shown for the values of that value set. By default, the context segment is hidden since it maps to the value set code and is not expected to be changed.
You can also define global segments that are shown for all value sets. However, this would be quite unusual since it would mean that you want to capture that attribute for all values for all value sets.
Deployment
When you deploy a flexfield, the value sets assigned to the segments of the flexfield provide users with the valid values for the attributes represented by the segments.