Considerations for Creating and Updating Record Types and Picklists

General

• If each profile is associated with a single record type, users will never be prompted to select a record type when creating records.
• Don’t name your record type Master because the name is reserved.
• Don’t use record types as an access control mechanism. Profile assignment governs create and edit access for an object but doesn’t govern read access. For example, a user assigned to a profile that isn't enabled for a particular record type can't create records with that record type, but can access records associated with that record type. Users with access to an object can read all record type information for that object.
• We strongly recommend against storing sensitive information in the record type description, name, or label. Instead, store sensitive information in a separate object or fields to which you applied appropriate access controls.
• A user can be associated with several record types. For example, a user who creates marketing campaigns for both US and European divisions can have both US and European campaign record types available when creating campaigns.
• When creating and editing record types for accounts, opportunities, cases, contacts, or custom objects, check for criteria-based sharing rules that use existing record types as criteria. A record type change can affect the number of records that the rule shares. For example, let's say you have a record type named Service, and you created a criteria-based sharing rule that shares all Service record types with your service team. If you create another record type named Support, and you want these records shared with your service team, update the sharing rule to include Support record types in the criteria.
• Deleting a record type also deletes the related path.
• Business and person accounts require at least one active record type.
• Deleting campaign member record types updates the Campaign Member Type field on campaign and campaign member records.
• Person accounts are account records to which a special record type has been assigned. These record types are called person account record types. Person account record types allow contact fields to be available on the account and allow the account to be used as if it were a contact. A default person account record type named Person Account is automatically created when person accounts are enabled for your org. You can change the name of this record type, and you can create more person account record types.
• From the UI, you can change an account’s record type from a business account to a business account or from a person account to a person account. However, to change an account’s record type from a business account to a person account, or vice versa, you must use the API.
• When overriding a standard action with an Aura component on an object with more than one active record type, the record type selection screen uses Salesforce Classic styling on mobile devices.
• When users convert, clone, or create records, these special considerations apply.
  • When a user converts a lead, the new account, contact, and opportunity records use the default record type for the owner of the new records. The user can choose a different record type during conversion.
  • When a user clones a record, the new record has the record type of the cloned record. If the user’s profile doesn’t have access to the record type of the cloned record, the new record adopts the user’s default record type.
  • When a user creates a case or lead and applies assignment rules, the new record can keep the creator’s default record type or take the record type of the assignee, depending on the case and lead settings specified by the administrator.
• Changing a record type causes Lightning pages to refresh.
• Field accessibility settings for Record Type fields are ignored in Lightning Experience. For example, if you set the Opportunity Record Type field access settings to Read-Only, you can't edit that field from a record page in Salesforce Classic, but you can from a record page in Lightning Experience. To get around this issue, use a validation rule to prevent changes to the field in Lightning Experience.
• Before creating a record using Apex, ensure that the object's default record type is active.

Deactivating Record Types

Consider these guidelines if you’re deactivating a record type.

• Deactivating a record type doesn’t remove it from any user profiles or permission sets.
• Deactivating a record type means that no new records can be created with the record type. However, any records that were previously created with the record type are still associated with it and with its associated page layout.
• To deactivate all record types from an object, remove all record types from all the profiles and deactivate the record types. Then create one new record type and activate it, but don’t add it to any profiles. One record type must exist to enable existing records that used the deactivated record types to display properly.

If you encounter any issues inline editing a record in Lightning Experience after deactivating a record type, edit the Page Layout Assignment so that another layout on the object, such as the default layout, is used for the custom record type. Otherwise, consider reactivating the disabled record type.

Record Types and Picklists

• Before creating record types, include all the possible record type values in your master list of picklists. The master picklist is a complete list of picklist values that can be used in any record type.
• Changing the default value of the master picklist doesn’t affect the default value of the picklist for a record type.
• The master picklist is independent of all record types and business processes. If you add a picklist value to the master picklist, you must manually include the new value in the appropriate record types. If you remove a picklist value from the master, it’s no longer available when creating records, but records assigned to that value are unchanged.
• When you create a record type without cloning an existing one, the new record type automatically includes the master picklist values for both standard and custom picklists. You can then customize the picklist values for the record type.
• To retrieve custom picklist values with record types from an org that has source tracking disabled, add the custom picklist fields to the org's package.xml file.