New Dashboard Setting: Share Filters

[MultiTech]

When you have a dashboard, each view inside it will have it's own filter setting.

• It would be great if there was a way where I could designate, at the Dashboard level, that all the views inside should share the same filter. 
  • This would require that all the tables be the same, which is fine in plenty of dashboard scenarios where we've got buckets for the same table's records.
    

This way if we applied a filter to one, it applies to all - smoothing out certain UX issues where we want to filter all at once.

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Cheers; and as always, thanks for considering!

[CleanSheets]

Hi @MultiTech ,

This is a really good request because it has a lot of use cases.

I have been doing this myself to fill the gap.

This particular app below had requirements to have the desktop view the same as the phone view to allow for people to switch between then without much of a learning curve and phones being used the most.

Each user gets their own Filter. Filters have filter groups (e.g. "Staff Leave"), each group is a row for each user in the filter table. This makes the filters transient across views but still specific to the data commonly grouped.

An unitended consequence I've been playing with in the last couple of days, is that because this Filter follows the user the around the app (which you track with a dynamic slice), you can give the "filter" more than just filter options, so I've just added "View Types" as well.
This means the user doesn't have to leave the one view if they want reporting vs data and if they don't like cards, the same data can be presented as a table.
The view options available for each view are managed in the app in the App Views table. Putting it there means dashboards can offer different styles, for example Charts - Totals and Charts - Drill Down.

The gif is super grainy as this forum file size is very small and I didn't play around with optimising it too much.

Filtering of views

On the phone view, the filter is a tab, so it's present and accessible, but doesn't get in the way:

Cheers

[MultiTech]

Yeah that's a standard technique that's been around for years called an enhanced dashboard, others call it a dynamic dashboard; I'm looking for an enhancement of the newer feature. 

[bradlegassick]

Second this, will make the use of dashboards way more intuitive for users. Is there an up vote link?

[CleanSheets]

I'm sorry @MultiTech, I wasn't implying you weren't aware of the functionality and I can see I diluted my message with the view component. The information was not to tell you how to do something, it was to add a visual for consideration.
I read your title as wanting a 'new dashboard setting' regarding shared filters, not 'new UI' filtering in the dashboard, as you've now clarified.

Regardless, I agree with your request and was trying to add value as to why.

What I was trying to do was highlight the value in persistent filter data across views in a dashboard, per your request; and also across app views themselves. It makes a difference if you have one dashboard with varying views in it, as the previous video highlighted, or multiple views of dashboards.

I don't want to derail this request, so I will make my considerations for the AppSheet team clearer and I can start a different thread about filters in general.

1. Ability to pin the said dashboard filter view would be good so users can see what's being filtered and not just think data is missing because the filter is quite small and hidden.
2. The filters should persist based on filter groups or data tables perhaps, but also data types. E.g. Leave Balances could be one table and Leave Requests could be a second table, but the filter group "Leave" is handier. Hence what I was trying to show regarding the difference between one dynamic dashboard or multiple views of dashboards.
3. I have found that users have a preference to not set filters each time they return to a view, they want to, for example, pick their ‘Team’ and leave that until a broader scope is necessary.

If you have 'Leave' data, you most likely want the filter to carry across all leave views and dashboards. The video below shows, rather than setting the filter multiple times (less than currently under your request, but still more than I believe is necessary) the filter is carried across multiple dashboards, where suitable.

Separately, for this comment, there could be groupings of tables in the filter box, which would allow for filtering of mixed data sources in the dashboard views.

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@MultiTech wrote:

This would require that all the tables be the same, which is fine in plenty of dashboard scenarios where we've got buckets for the same table's records.

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New Desktop UI, filters persisting

[MultiTech]

No worries @CleanSheets 💪