Forum Discussion

AnnettaColeman's avatar
AnnettaColeman
Qrew Cadet
2 years ago

How to pre-populate dynamic filter on Dashboard tab

I am the Product Owner for an QB App that serves a fast growing segment of a Fortune 100 company.   We have a number of Product Teams.   Each Product Team will have a Dashboard with multiple tabs.   Some of the tabs will be standard across all Product Teams and some of the tabs will be specialized for the Product Team.

For the standard tabs, we have a simple dynamic filter that is associated to numerous widgets on that tab.   How to we pre-populate the filter with the Product Team associated to that dashboard?   The current dashboard works great and will save the time of developing dozens of specialized reports and widgets, but I am confident the users will want to save themselves a couple of clicks of having to select the Product Team that is being served by the dashboard.    

 



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Annetta Coleman
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  • I understand that you want to have a set of foundational reports and don't want to replicate them N times for each different Product Team.

    I have this exact situation in place with one of my clients where for some Roles, staff is typically associated with a branch, and they are typically only interested in records for their own branch. 


    I suggest that you create a table a users whee the Key Field is either the users email address or the userid.

    Then you load that table with the employees preferred Product Team(s).

    then you make a relationship to any of the details tables which end up being displayed as reports on the dashboard where the reference field on the relationship is a formula for the the current user

    User()

    Then you go back to all of your reports and you add a filter that essentially says the records need to belong to that product team or else the current user has no preferred Product Team loaded. That will cover the situation for higher level managers who cross all Product Teams. 

    So that your challenge is to determine how you maintain this table of users where the key field is the user ID or the users email address and keep it updated as new employees get on boarded and belong to different product teams.

    If you don't have a source available to keep that employee list up-to-date, there are strategies to be able to create a button on the dashboard where when a user presses that button they would add them self to that table and be able to adjust their preferred product teams. 



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    Mark Shnier (Your Quickbase Coach)
    mark.shnier@gmail.com
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    • AnnettaColeman's avatar
      AnnettaColeman
      Qrew Cadet

      Hi Mark -
      Thanks for your prompt reply.   You certainly 'get' that we do not want to replicate several dozen widgets and reports 'N' times for 'N' different Product Teams.  However our Use Case is slightly different than what you portrayed.

      We actually have a Product Team "User Maintained Table' that identifies which Product Team members should be notified of certain events, such as a new Intake.  However our Value Chain "Work Groups" are much more broadly defined.   And we have numerous Portfolio Leaders who will want to visit various Work Group Dashboards regularly.   Thus we do not seek to filter the Dashboard reports by User.  

      Our Intake Process actually stamps each Project Record with impacted Value Chain(s), Impacted Market(s) and Impacted System(s).   Thus we have a an easy key reference field (the impacted Value Chain(s)) that we would like to use to pre-populate the Dashboard filter for each of our Value Chain Dashboards.   The actual Dashboard filters work VERY nicely, but I am confident our Value Chain Teams will not want the hassle of selecting the filter for each tab on their dashboard.

      I actually want the best of both worlds......   for the Value Chain Dashboards to each provide their filtered KPIs and reports without having the Value Chain teams have to set the filter and without my team having to create literally hundreds of redundant reports.

      There must be a way to programmatically 'stuff' the Value Chain into the Dashboard filter as a default (and still allow the user to adjust the filter if they so desire).   Thoughts?

      I greatly appreciate your input.

      Warm Regards,   



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      Annetta Coleman
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      • MarkShnier__You's avatar
        MarkShnier__You
        Icon for Qrew Legend rankQrew Legend

        It sounds like you would need a product enhancement, something along the lines of Dynamic Form Rules, except for instead for Dashboards.

        my only other thought given that there's probably no magic bullet here is maybe you can provide as simple as possible filter on the dashboard, so tue user just hast to do one click to filter for my favorite product teams.  



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        Mark Shnier (Your Quickbase Coach)
        mark.shnier@gmail.com
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