Limitations and Workarounds for Multivalue Fields in CRM Analytics

This article documents the known limitations of multivalue fields in CRM Analytics and provides recommendations for working around these limitations where possible. CRM Analytics does not fully support multivalue fields across all operations. Where possible, it is recommended to restructure data to avoid relying on multivalue fields for operations that require joins, groupings, or compute transformations.

Limitations of Multivalue Fields:
Supported in Filters — Multivalue fields work in filters. Note: When defining a filter on a multivalue field in the UI, searching within the values for filter criteria may return unexpected results. This does not impact the functionality of the filter itself.

Supported in Security Predicates — Multivalue fields work in Security Predicates. Important: Multivalue fields have a limit of 32,000 characters. When used in a security predicate and a value cannot be found, it is likely due to this character limit causing the value to be truncated. To verify, use the array_join() function in a recipe transform node to convert the multivalue field to a string and check whether the value is truncated.

Not fully supported in UI and SAQL code — Faceting, Interactions (Bindings), and SAQL queries involving multivalue fields will likely fail or produce unexpected results.

Not supported in XMD — The "isMultiValue" parameter will fail to validate if included in XMD 2.0.

Not fully supported in ValuesTable — A ValuesTable will show only one value from the array rather than the full list.

Not fully supported in Record Action Display Fields — The record action disambiguation screen shows only one value rather than the full list when a multivalue field is included in Display Fields.

Cannot be used as Augment or Join keys — The left or right key of an Augment (in a dataflow) or a Join (in a recipe) cannot be a multivalue field.

Negative impact to Augment performance — Including multivalue fields in the right_select parameter of an Augment may cause the Augment processing time to increase significantly.

Negative impact to sfdcRegister performance — Registering a dataset that includes one or more LookupMultiValue Augment operations results in a significant increase to processing time.

Not supported in computeExpression and computeRelative — Multivalue fields are not supported in computeExpression and computeRelative nodes in a dataflow. When ingesting a datasource with a multivalue field and a compute node is added downstream, the multivalue field may lose its multivalue attribute and be converted to a plain Text field.

Not fully supported in Grouping — Multivalue fields do work as groupings in a Lens or Query but may cause negative impact to query performance. Do not use multiple multivalue fields in nested groupings, as this produces a Cartesian product that is highly likely to cause query timeout.

Negative impact to List widget performance — Including a multivalue field in the query for a List widget may cause negative query performance impact.

Not fully supported in Data Prep — Multivalue fields may not display or be available in Data Prep recipes. Join Nodes cannot use multivalue fields as keys. Transform Nodes (except for multivalue formula functions) do not support multivalue fields. Append Nodes do not support multivalue fields.

Dates lose date part associations — Attempting to create a multivalue field from a Date field disassociates the individual date components, resulting in meaningless data. A dataflow warning results when this is attempted.

Not supported with sharing inheritance — If an object's Id is used in a multivalue field, then Sharing Inheritance will not work for that object.

Not supported in Einstein Discovery.

Recommendations:
For Augments — Restructuring the grain direction to avoid multiple matches is the optimal approach.
For Multi-select Picklists — Multiselect Picklist field values are ingested as a single, delimited string. Ensure that the Precision value in the sfdcDigest metadata is set high enough to include the full set of picklist values. If you need to see all field values in a table rather than a single value from the array, ingest the field as a single-value field by setting "isMultiValue" to false and removing the "multiValueSeparator" parameter. This allows the field to work with "contains" filters, though it will not be effective in groupings.
For External Data — Set the "isMultiValue" parameter in the external metadata to false to ingest the field as a single string. Use "contains" filters for proper filtering. If grouping is needed, consider duplicating the field as both a multivalue version (for grouping) and a single-value version (for other functions).

General recommendation — Do not rely on multivalue fields for necessary data operations in CRM Analytics.