Defining reference data

Reference data is a set of values that you can use in a business entity picklist field. Use reference data, such as countries, currency codes, and cost centers, to standardize the use of values. You can manually create reference data, import a reference data from a file, or use reference data created in Reference 360.

For example, a Country reference data might contain a list of all the countries in the world. If you need a Country field in a business entity, add a Country picklist field that has values sourced from the Country reference data.

You can use reference data that's dependent on other reference data to provide context for values that are not unique, such as the names of cities. For example, to uniquely identify a city, you need the state and country of the city. Dependent reference data narrows down a large set of values. For example, when the City reference data is dependent on the Country and State reference data, only the cities within the selected state of a country are listed.

Reference data includes code values, which are unique values, such as business terms, codes, and lookup values. When you use the predefined data model, reference data such as gender, countries, and currencies are available by default.

Note:

You can't open a reference data and add code values and crosswalks in Business 360 Console. Use Reference 360 to open a reference data and add code values and crosswalks for reference data.

Reference data can be multilingual. Multilingual reference data includes the values of string attributes, such as Name and Description, in multiple languages. To localize reference data, add the languages to the Localization Languages code list in Reference 360. The Localization Languages code list defines the languages that your organization uses, identifies each language with a BCP 47 language code, and sets the default language.

When you create reference data in Business 360 Console, you can set the Name or Description attribute as multilingual. In Reference 360, enter the reference data set or code list attribute values for each language. In business applications, multilingual picklist field values appear in the language of your browser locale. If the picklist values aren't localized for the browser locale, the values appear in the default language that you configure in Reference 360.

Preview Notice:

Effective in the October 2026 release, the ability to manage multilingual reference data is available for preview.

Preview functionality is supported for evaluation purposes but is unwarranted and is not supported in production environments or any environment that you plan to push to production. Informatica intends to include the preview functionality in an upcoming release for production use, but might choose not to in accordance with changing market or technical circumstances. For more information, contact Informatica Global Customer Support.