Renaming one of the choices without screwing up the rest of the list?

  • 20 August 2018
  • 5 replies
  • 1 view
C
Badge +8

Nintex wizards, I probably have an easy challenge for you. I have a list with 2000+ items. The list has a choice field, and I want to update the verbiage of one of the choices.

However, if I do that in the list settings, all the existing list items that have that choice will have the "old" version of the choice, and if anyone tried to edit an unrelated field in those items, they wouldn't be able to save it unless they ALSO changed the "old" version of that field to the new.

I need a (hopefully simple way) to make this change for all items - I'm assuming it's going to involve something silly like a workflow that will run in a loop on all items, and a "run if" that will look for the old value, remove it and add the new value. 

Is there an easier way to do this?

5 replies

E
Userlevel 5
Badge +14

how many items do you need to change?

if not so many, you could create a view that shows just items with old value in choice field.

then prepare in a excel a column with all the new choice values.

copy&paste new values from excel to list in a quick edit mode.

C
Badge +8

Thanks Marian!  There are quite a few, and to complicate things more, this is a multi-choice (checkbox) field, so some of the items have other choices selected in addition to the one value I need to change.

S
Badge +8

Hi Chris,

I guess there wont be an easy way and the approach you suggested might be the best possible option. I do think creating the workflow in Nintex to update this wont take that long.

If you had a lookup field then all the values in your list would have got updated as SharePoint stores only the reference to the lookup value but as this is choice field SP will store the actual value, so you would need to update all the values through some automation (Nintex or a PS script!). Unless there is someone who might have a OOB approach to do this in SP.

Regards,

Shrini

E
Userlevel 5
Badge +14

then I would maybe exported whole list to an excel, replace that single choice value, (cleared the list in SP) and imported it back to SP list.

for 2k+ items that shouldn't be a big deal.

only problem might be if you have any dependent lists/lookups on this list, since item IDs will change.

if this is as well not viable then the best approach really would be to create a small workflow that performs update.

S
Badge +7

Your first lesson from this should be to use Lookups where you can wink.png

Yeah multiple ways to tackle this. You could workflow it to lookup all ID's with the old name and using For Each ID, update to the new name.

Another way is to just use the edit option on your list. Just copy and paste into the field your new name.

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