Interactive filters are a powerful feature you can add to homepages and Performance Analytics dashboards containing report gauges. With interactive filters, you enable your users to visually filter information directly on the homepage or dashboard. This helps users quickly find the information they need without having to navigate to a different location or create a new report. For example, you add a choice list for Incident Category that allows users to see all incidents or filter on a specific category such as Software or Hardware.
I wrote a blog post earlier this year about how to add interactive filters to homepages and Performance Analytics dashboards. In this post, I'd like to highlight some best practices to use when creating interactive filters. Full credit for the content of this post goes to ServiceNow Customer Support agent extraordinaire, iris.geist, for her knowledge base article about interactive filter best practices.
How do indexes and interactive filters work together?
Most important is that interactive filters work best on reports that are indexed well. An efficient report index narrows down the result set appropriately. Any interactive filters that are added can then use the index. It is best to use no more than five items per index and to keep filter fields in one index.
Do I include interactive filters in indexes?
Simple answer is yes, for indexes that are frequently used and not too large. Stay away from interactive filters if your report is already pretty specific, the query isn't used very often, or the index is already large. Also, avoid using interactive filters on non-indexed fields.
What about performance?
If an interactive filter is not responding in a timely manner, try running with Debug SQL and check the slow query log for an entry that corresponds to the SQL statement. This can help you troubleshoot and ensure that the best index is being used or if one needs to be created. After making changes, check that slow query log again and see if the situation has improved.
Additional information
For complete information and examples, read Iris Geist's knowledge base article about interactive filter best practices.
The ServiceNow Community contains discussions and blog posts about interactive filters:
- rahulgarg asked if it was possible to set default values for interactive filters and pieter.goris on the ServiceNow Performance Analytics team had the answer
- pieter.goris came through again when ankitmathur and thomashenshaw wanted to know if they could add an interactive filter in a Performance Analytics widget
- Also related to interactive filters was a discussion started by adilbelahbib about how to filter assets based on a field in a referenced table. brian.quinn, on our ServiceNow Customer Support team, suggested building a custom interactive filter.
General information about interactive filters is available in the product documentation:
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