The purpose of dashboard filters is to reduce the number of dashboards you have to create to display the information you want.
Consider an organization that has multiple divisions. Using dashboard filters you're able to create widgets to display the data you want to see across the organization and then choose a particular division from the dashboard which will filter the data accordingly.
Let's go through an example. The following dashboard displays lagging safety indicators of incident data from across an organization.
Note in the screenshot below the Division drop down box. By selecting a particular division, widgets are filtered to only show information about the division you selected.
Other potential dashboard filters could be processes such as: Jobs, Projects, Assets, and Equipment.
Setup
To setup a filter navigate to the dashboard you want to apply a filter and click Use filter.
A filter menu will now be shown.
Click + Add a filter to add a new filter.
On the Add a filter page you'll setup your filter. The first configuration to do is add a Filter name. In the example below I've used Division.
The Target process is the process you want to filter by. In this case we're going to select the Division process.
Participating processes are the processes that will be filtered by the Target process. For each process that is used by a widget, you will need to add it as a Participating process.
There are two types of Methods.
Allow default values should be used when you want a particular staff group to have a default value chosen when a user navigates to the dashboard. For example, if you had a Division A staff group, you may want users in that staff group to see data filtered for Division A when they navigate to that dashboard.
If you then only wanted a user to see the default value you have chosen for them, you would choose Yes for Read only. If you wanted the user to be able to choose other values from the filter you would choose No for Read only.
Use parent field when you want to make it easier for users to chose the value they want to filter by. For example, if you have many different divisions, you may want to provide the user the ability to choose a business unit first that will limit the number of divisions that are shown in the filter list.
With this setup this is now what users would see on their dashboard.
