Platform Analytics - Cascading Filters

[Michael Ford1]

Hello everyone,

I'm trying to set up some filters on a Platform Analytics dashboard that cascade similar to a cascading filter on a Performance Analytics dashboard. This tab of the dashboard reports on the Incident [incident] table, and I'm trying to filter first on the VP of the incident's assignment group [sys_user_group.u_vp] and then on the Manager of the Incident's assignment group [sys_user_group.manager]. The goal is for the VP filter to also filter the list of Managers, so that you do not have to scroll through all managers to find only those under the selected VP.

I've been having trouble getting this to work. I have another filter on Assignment Group, which works based on selections of the other two filters, but I'm struggling to get VP to filter Manager.

Any help is appreciated!

[jeffrubinoff]

Have you been following the documentation? https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/xanadu-now-intelligence/page/use/par-for-workspace/task/create-se...

[Michael Ford1]

I have been following the documentation, and can replicate the example of Manager and Assignment group with no trouble. It's when I try to cascade Group.VP > Group.Manager that I run into difficulty. The closest I've been able to get is finding groups that have the selected VP listed as a Manager (ex. John Smith is selected as VP, I can also select John Smith from the Manager filter), but I have not been able to use VP to filter the list of managers based on the selected VP (ex. John Smith is selected as VP, the Manager filter should show managers of groups that John Smith is VP of). 

[jeffrubinoff]

There's an essential logical issue, which I will try to explain though I'm not sure I can make it clear. To quote the architect of the filters, "The relationship between VP and Manager is not well defined, so we cannot cascade."

Consider again the example in the doc. The first filter is on the Manager field on the Group table. The second filter is on Group records themselves, via a reference field on Incident. Manager is a field on Group, so you can define Group records by the Manager value, so you are fine.

However, your two filters are both on fields on the Group table. You can define Group records by their VP value, and you can define Group records by their Manager value, but you cannot define Manager values by VP values, because Manager does not have a VP 'value.' The filters would work if there were such a thing as a Manager table record with a VP field, for example.

[Ryan Monsen]

Hi Jeff, essentially we want similar to a Cascading Interactive Filter which is currently available in the legacy Performance Analytics dashboards. You can find an example of what I set up in the legacy Interactive Filters on this post.

In Michael's case, consider two filters:

sys_user_group.u_vp

• This would be a filter on the Group table, on field VP.
• The values available to select would be, by default, all values.

sys_user_group.manager

• This would also be a filter on the Group table, on field Manager.
• The values available to select would be, by default, all values.
• Theoretically, if VP was already selected and we were able to connect Manager to VP, selecting a VP would filter the Manager values able to be selected to just ones from the Group table that match VP = [selection].

Because both of these filters sit on the same Group table, the values to be selected are (assumedly) sourced from there, so it should be possible to refresh the second filter and only grab values available after applying a selection the connected filter. See my visual mockup below.

This is necessary for such things as dependent choice values (Incident's Category and Subcategory is a well-known example). Not everything we want to filter by is a reference field. Without this ability, filters are difficult to use for some business cases, and I have been unable to completely transition some dashboards to Platform Analytics.