[SalesForce] State & Country picklists – importing leads with states for countries without states enabled

Setup | Data Management | State and Country Picklists

Click on 'Configure States and Countries'

Find the Country you want to change visibility of States

Click on the Visible check box (for all states of that country or selected states if you want to remove from the picklist only some states). Any data entered so far will not be lost.

If states are established and (in)visible, then even the SFDC API enforces that you enter a valid state code. Disappointingly, State and country picklists aren't available in salesforce1 at least as of v29.

The 'Disable state and country picklists' is essentially reverting SFDC back to out-of-box 'state' wherein country and state fields are strings, not picklists. The various warnings above are saying that filters etc that are picklists for country and state will be eliminated as you are changing the data type for these fields. If you disable the whole feature and reenable the feature, the filter options become available again but they won't suddenly re-appear on reports/views where they existed before you disabled. Similar remark about merge fields, field updates, VF pages. I proved this to myself on one of my test orgs. Thus, if you went to a lot of trouble adding filters to reports, you would have to do it again.

Thanks for the post Jeremy. It put us on the track to do resolve our problem. We still maintain that SF would better serve its end users by implementing as we suggested in the initial post, but it is what it is . Posting here for the benefit of others who may have run into this kind of problem.

The only problem with get/put is that in order to use get, you must have queried the original field before calling it, else you will get a runtime SOQL error: "SObject row was retrieved via SOQL without querying the requested field: "

Curiously, the put will work regardless.

The way around this is to use Dynamic SOQL Query, something like:

public class ChangeAccountBillingAddress
{
public List<Account> oAccount; 
public Id apCurPage {get; set;}
private String stateFieldName = 'BillingState';
private String countryFieldName = 'BillingCountry';

public ChangeAccountBillingAddress(ApexPages.StandardController controller) 
{
    apCurPage = ApexPages.currentPage().getParameters().get('id');

    if(PickListsEnabled())
    {
        stateFieldName = 'BillingStateCode';
        countryFieldName = 'BillingCountryCode';
    }
    String acctQuery = String.escapeSingleQuotes('select Account.BillingStreet, Account.BillingCity, Account.BillingPostalCode,' +
       stateFieldName + ',' + countryFieldName + ' from Account where Id =:apCurPage');

    oAccount = Database.query(acctQuery);
}


public PageReference ChangeBillingAddress()
{
    String stateVal = oAccount[0].get(stateFieldName);
    if(stateVal != 'IL')
    {
         oAccount[0].BillingStreet = '1060 W Addison St';
         oAccount[0].BillingCity = 'Chicago';
         oAccount[0].put(stateFieldName,'IL');
         oAccount[0].BillingPostalCode = '60613-4566';
         oAccount[0].put(countryFieldName,'US');
         update oAccount;
    }

    PageReference pageRef = new PageReference('/' + apCurPage);         

    pageRef.setRedirect(true);         
    return pageRef;               
}

private boolean PickListsEnabled()
{
     // if Account Billing Address is enabled, assume all addresses are enabled
     //return Account.BillingCountry.getDescribe().getType() == Schema.DisplayType.Picklist;
     Map<String, Schema.SObjectField> M = Schema.SObjectType.Account.fields.getMap();
     return M.containsKey('BillingStateCode');
}

}

The above code will compile and more importantly run correctly on orgs with picklistst enabled or picklists not enabled.