What is a typelist?

Guidewire PolicyCenter displays many fields in the interface as drop-down lists of possible values. The list of available values for a drop-down field is called a typelist. Typelists limit the acceptable values for many fields within the application. Thus, a typelist represents a predefined set of possible values, with each separate value defined as a typecode. Whenever there is a drop-down list in the PolicyCenter interface, it is usually a typelist.

For example, the PolicyCenter Contact page that you access as you edit policy vehicle information contains several different typelists. One of these is the Marital Status typelist that provides the available values from which you can choose as you enter information about a vehicle owner.

Typelists are very common for coding fields on the root objects of an application. They are also common for status fields used for application logic. Some typelist usage examples from the Data Dictionary include:

• Contact.Country uses a simple list.
• PersonalVehicle.BodyType uses a list filtered by VehicleType (that is, choices for this body type depend on the value of the vehicle type).

Besides displaying the text describing the different options in a drop-down list, typelists also serve a very important role in integration. Guidewire recommends that you design your typelists so that you can map their typecodes (values) to the set of codes used in your legacy applications. This is a very important step in making sure that you code a policy in PolicyCenter to values that can be understood by other applications within your company.