Right now, if you create a control drop down menu and link that to a column in a dataset, it uses every value in that column, across the entire dataset. Unfortunately, this does not suit my use case.
What I would like to request is the ability to apply a filter to a drop-down menu, such as, for example, only listing the store locations of a certain client, or only showing values that appear under a certain category, or something like that.
Currently, the only way to really do this is to create an entire separate dataset that already has said filter applied to do it, and this doesn’t help if that filter might change based on user input.
Hello @Lawrence_Kimsey, there is a way to manage the options displayed in the control dropdown by utilizing Cascading Filters.
You can also utilize the Show Relevant Values option to make a Control displays values related to another control. For example, if you had a control for Clients, which from a user perspective may only show a single option if RLS is implemented. This control could then be linked to your dropdown for store locations. If you edit your store locations control, select Show Relevant Values, and link it to the client control, then only the options related to that Client will display.
The only thing to note, this functionality works great when selecting down the tree of options. Like if you select client, then select location it is great. Then, if you change client with the location still selected it will show No Data on your visuals if that location doesn’t exist. It can be helpful to add a text box with instructions to make sure the Store Location is set to Select All first before updating a parent control.
I will mark this as a solution for now, if you have any follow-up questions, please let me know!
I was hoping to be able to use a parameter to filter out options, since that’s what we’re using to filter down to specific clients. The “Show Relevant Values” only works for other control menus, which is a start but we’re specifically trying to avoid having a drop down menu just for that. It seems to currently be impossible to filter based on anything other than other control menus, which seems like an oversight to me, so my feature request stands.
Also, I seem to be having issues having the “Show Relevant Values” option actually show the filters that I want to use. It seems to be entirely unreliable because I can filter A based on B, but I can’t filter B based on A. For example I try to set it up so that the filter for ‘name’ show relevant value for the selection for ‘category’, since name is a subset of category, but I can only do it the other way around for some reason and filter category by name… which is useless because that would only show one option.
I’ll look into this ‘cascading filters’ thing, but I can’t see a way to use it properly for what I’m trying to do yet. I don’t see any option to apply an action to a drop-down menu, only a visual.
Hello @Lawrence_Kimsey, I see your point. The only other alternative options I can think of would be applying RLS on the dataset that you use to build out your controls to filter the options in the dropdown based on the client linked to that user. You could even add a client control to the sheet that would show or hide based on some type of admin parameter if you built your sheet on a free form layout so that any admin users who needed to be able to switch between clients can do so.
Here is some documentation on using those conditional rules:
Thank you for your feedback, it helps us build a better service. I understand though that this does not exactly meet your expectations, so I have tagged this as a feature request as well. I hope the work-arounds provided can at least provide some of the functionality you were hoping for.