The Search Filter enables users to find specific values through flexible, keyword-based searches. It is especially valuable when dealing with datasets that contain a large number of diverse values or text-heavy columns, where an exact match is not always known or relevant. The widget can be used to find specific words, phrases, or portions of words across rows, making it ideal for tasks that require sorting or filtering by tags, categories, or descriptions. It is commonly utilized in dashboards for data exploration, particularly with unstructured or semi-structured data, such as support tickets, survey feedback, emails, and churn analyses. Unlike the dropdown or slicer filters, the Search Filter allows users to perform loose keyword searches.
The Search Filter can be accessed in the dashboard editor under the 'Filters' section. Adding it to a dashboard is achieved by clicking on it or by drag and drop. There is one data slot to add data to - ‘Dimension’.
A column of data type hierarchy can be used in this slot. Once configured, the Search Filter displays a search bar where users can input keywords to filter results in real time.
In the chart settings there is a possibility to turn off the Label. By default it will use the column name. In the settings you can also add a title to the Search filter.
The 'Filter with Apply button' setting option allows you to toggle between reactively applying filtering immediately after typing or having to press the search button on the filter. Turning on this option will reduce queries number without a need to reload linked widgets on each selection.
Text used for the placeholder is customizable as well. By default it’s set up to ‘Select…’.
You can also enable a filter initialization. As such the initialized filter will be applied immediately when opening the dashboards next time.
Columns from multiple datasets can be added to the same search filter in the 'Dimension' slot. This can allow you to filter multiple datasets to the same value(s), even if they are not linked together.