Working with Filters
While views determine which columns of data are displayed in the grid, users can also control what rows of records return in the grid by using Filters. Beyond views, filters further the ability of the user to display specific information needed to do their job.
Before working with Filters, be sure you understand how to work with Views. See Working with Views.
Filters allow only specified records (Trackors) that meet chosen criteria to display in the grid. The filter may be as broad as to include every record for a View (the “All” Filter) or as limited as to include no records at all if there is nothing meeting the filter’s criteria. As you work in the Vizion Platform, you will see that pages have both a view and a filter listed beside each other in the header of the page. Every available filter for a page is compatible with any selected view for the page. Below is an example of a General Info View with the Atlanta Market Filter. This filter is set to show only the records in the Atlanta market.
This Filter is named ”Atlanta Market.”
An additional way to filter the grid is with Quick Search. See Using Quick Search.
The Administrator may determine a default filter for a page when setting up the menu item in the system. If a default filter is not set, the All Filter displays upon first loading of the page and then the user’s last choice after that.
Finding a Filter
The Vizion Platform allows for the creation of an unlimited number of filters. To find a particular filter, complete the following steps.
Steps to Find a Filter
Click on the Filter name or the “down arrow” beside the Filter name. A window displays views on the left side and filters on the right side.
Click on the “expand arrow” beside Global Filters to expand the list of Global Filters.
Click on the “expand arrow” beside Local Filters to expand the list of Local Filters.
You can scroll through these lists to find the Filter you want, or if you know the name of the filter you want to see, type the name in the Search field.
Global Filters (identified by G:) can be accessed by multiple users with permissions, whereas Local Filters (identified by L:) can be accessed only by you.
Using a Filter
After you find a filter, you can open it to see and use the data for the selected View/Filter combination. To use a particular filter for a view, complete the following steps.
Steps to Use a Filter
Find the filter to open. See Finding a Filter.
Click on the Filter name.
Click Save/Apply. The data for the selected View/Filter displays.
Alternatively, you can double-click the filter name to display the new filter.
Adding a New Filter
When you add a new filter in the Vizion Platform, you start with an existing filter. Once you start to make changes to a filter, you are working with an “Unsaved Filter” which you will then save as a new filter.
Steps to Add a New Filter
Step | Instruction | Screenshot Help/Example |
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1 | Find the filter (see Finding a Filter) you want to start, select the Filter name and click Edit. If you want to start with a blank filter, select the All filter. |
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2 | A form displays where you will see the existing conditions for the filter you are changing. If you want an empty form, click the Clear Filter icon in the bottom left-hand corner of the window. | 
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3 | Make any necessary changes. Some filters allow you to choose fields and build conditions and others (on Admin pages) will list the fields you can filter in a form format. In either case, you are creating conditions to choose the records you want to work with. If you need help creating a condition for your filter, see Creating Conditions for the Filter and Building Conditional Expressions for more advanced conditional statements. |
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4 | Click OK. |
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5 | Click the Unsaved Filter filter name. |  |
6 | Click the icon next to Unsaved Filter. | 
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7 | Complete the following fields in the popup to create a custom name for your Filter: New - Keep the selection New. Folder Dropdown - Select the folder where you want your new filter to reside. If you select Global Filters or a G: folder, everyone with permissions can use the new filter. If you select Local Filters or an L: folder, you will be the only one who can use the new filter. If you create the filter as a Local Filter and decide it should be Global, you will need Admin permissions to change it. See Steps to Change a Local View or Filter to be a Global View or Filter on the Organizing the List Views or Filters page. Enter Filter Name - Enter the name for the filter. | 
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8 | Click OK. |
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Modifying a Filter
Sometimes a particular filter may need to be changed to fit the user’s needs. When you change a filter, you are changing the conditions that need to be met for a Trackor to display on the grid. For example, a filter might display records with a status of “open,” “pending” and “closed.” If you want to see only the records with an “open” status, you will need to change the filter to include only the “open” status.
Steps to Modify a Filter
Step | Instruction | Screenshot Help/Example |
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1 | Find the filter (see Finding a Filter) you want to start, select the Filter name and click Edit. |
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2 | A form displays where you will see the existing conditions for the filter you are changing. If you want an empty form, click the Clear Filter icon in the bottom left-hand corner of the window. |  |
3 | Make any necessary changes. Some filters allow you to choose fields and build conditions and others (on Admin pages) will list the fields you can filter in a form format. In either case, you are creating conditions to choose the records you want to work with. If you need help creating a condition for your filter, see Creating Conditions for the Filter and Building Conditional Expressions for more advanced conditional statements. |  |
5 | Click the “down arrow” beside Unsaved Filter and scroll to find and click on the filter you are overriding. |   |
6 | Click OK. |
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Creating Conditions for the Filter
The filter format that typical users will see allows for conditions to be created from scratch and looks like the image below.
For each condition, select the:
Selecting Field for First Column
When you click the ellipsis for the first column in your filter condition, the default list of fields you can choose from are the fields (columns) that are in the current grid display. The selection in the top dropdown field is [Grid Columns].
Another option for the top dropdown field is [All]. If you select All, the selection list will include all of the Trackor Types related (ancestor or child) to the Trackor Type for the current grid display. In addition, you will have access to the Data Tab field where you can select a specific tab for the Trackor Type so that the field list will contain only the fields that are on that tab.
Other options for the top dropdown field are used for Projects and Workplans. See Special Filter Uses.
Auto-Completion for the Filter Field
In addition to using the ellipsis for this first column selection for your filter condition, you can type text for the field and press Enter to display a panel with possible values (limited to 100 values). Users can use this approach to save time and clicks rather than clicking the ellipsis and looking for the specific field.
Selecting Relation / Filter Operator
For information on filter operators, see Using Filter Operators.
Selecting Value(s) in Last Column
In the last column, enter the value or, for a dropdown field, click the ellipsis to see the available values to choose from. You can enter or select more than one entry so that you don’t have to create a separate condition for each. In the example below, the filter will return records where the project status is canceled or complete.
You can also include wildcards ( * ) to search by a leading value (ex: SEA*, will return all values that start with “SEA”). Use commas to separate values (Ex: SEA*, ATL*). Now you are looking at two leading values as a wild-card.
You can create multiple conditions in order to build a more complex conditional expression. See Building Conditional Expressions. However, if you want to simply create conditions all of which you want to apply to the filter, you can just list them in the top part of the filter form. "AND" logic is the default for filters, so if this is all you need, you do not have to build it as a conditional expression. In the example below, the filter will return the records where the project status is canceled or complete AND the market is Atlanta.
Building Conditional Expressions
Filters allow the use of conditional logic using AND and OR statements and parenthesis to group statements together. This allows for the creation of advanced queries that allow you to compare the results of your filter criteria against one another and apply advanced filtering based on the values present in different fields of data. This feature is referred to as Advanced Filter Logic.
To build the expression, you can click and drag statement numbers, wording, and parentheses to the conditional expression box. You can also double click in this box to use “text mode” to enter the expression by typing.
The following example includes a business problem and how to solve the problem using a Filter with a conditional expression.
The Business Case - Example
You are a manager within the Vendor & Supplier Management department for a large telecommunications company. One of your responsibilities is managing candidate site inspections for various compliance requirements and assigning these inspections to contractors.
Compliance requirements can vary greatly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Your job is to assign some inspection projects to one of your contractors covering sites in California and Washington State.
Your current compliance inspection project requires you to identify sites within the following parameters:
Sites limited to California and Washington State
Inspection of New Pole/Tower and Collocation Sites only
If the structure is located in California, inspections only need to be performed if the structure height is greater than 25 ft and the antenna radius is greater than 16 ft
If the structure is located in Washington State, inspections only need to be performed if the structure height is greater than 40 ft and the antenna radius is greater than 20 ft
Limit your search to only candidate sites with a Candidate Master Status of Active
Building an Advanced Filter
Based on the business case above, we will use the Candidate site page in our test system to demonstrate how you would use Filters to query your data based on the business case above.
We will be targeting a handful of fields within our Grid to build our Filter:
Our query will consist of the following:
C:Candidate Master Status = Active
C:State = California OR Washington
C:Installation Type = New Pole/Tower AND Collocation Sites
C:Overall Structure Height (Ft) > 25ft (if in California) OR > 40ft (if in Washington)
C:Antenna RAD Center (Ft) > 16ft (if in California OR > 20ft (if in Washington)
Please note that this example uses a test version of the Vizion Platform and is for illustration purposes only.
Step | Instruction | Screenshot Help/Example |
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1 | Following the steps in Modifying a Filter, select a filter and follow the steps to enter the edit menu. |
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2 | Within the Filter Form, we need to create the conditions for our filter so we can build a conditional expression to meet our business requirements. To start we will create conditions for the Filter that do not need further clarification ( will not be used within a sub-expression - between parenthesis() ). So the first two conditions will be:
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3 | Next we need to create the conditions we need to build the parts of our conditional expression (will be used in a sub-expression - between parenthesis() ). So the next conditions we need are:
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4 | With all the required conditions created, we will now build the conditional expression to meet our business case objective. Recall that we were asked to create a filter identifying Candidate sites within the following parameters:
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5 | Let’s break down the conditional expression section by section. Follow along with the numbered list below compared to the numbered squares in the screenshot to the right:
The numbers in parenthesis (2) map to the numbers in the screenshot to the right. | 
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6 | The output of our advanced filter was 9 candidate sites out of a larger population of 278. Notice how the output dataset matches our advanced Filter parameters. | 
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Organizing the List of Filters
You can organize your filters into folders so that they are easier to find. In addition, you can delete filters to keep your list current and uncluttered. For steps to organize your filters, see Organizing the List of Views or Filters.
Viewing Restriction Filters
Users can see any Restriction Filters applied to a page. If Restriction Filters are applied and the user has “Read” privilege for the security group "SHOW_APPLIED_RESTRICTION_FILTER,” the user will see a Restriction Filters tab when viewing the details of a Filter. The Filter tab will show the filter details and the Restriction Filters tab will show the applied Restriction Filters. The Restriction Filters are not editable.
For information on unique Filter setups, see Special Filter Uses.
Administration of FiltersAdministrators are responsible for creating and maintaining Global Filters which can be selected by any user with permissions for the Global Filter.
Assigning Global Filters to a Security RoleYou can either allow the security role to see all Global Filters as they are created or you can select specific Global Filters a security role can see. When you assign a Global Filter to a Security Role, all users with that role will have access to the Global Filter and then you can manage individual user access if necessary. See Managing a User’s Global Filters.
Steps to Assign All Global Filters to a Security Role
Assigning all Global Filters to a role will assign only new Global Filters moving forward. It will not backfill existing Global Filters. Existing Filters will need to be assigned to a desired role. 
Steps to Assign Specific Global Filters to a Security Role
Steps to Assign Security Role(s) to a Global Filter These steps start with the Global Filter and then assign the roles.
Managing a User’s Global Filters
Hiding Filter Controls for a PageSometimes it is best to restrict the use of a page to a single filter and remove the Filter controls. You need the SHOW_FILTER_BUTTON Security Group for this capability. Steps to Hide Filter Controls for a Page
Creating Default Filters for Trackor Selector FieldsYou can set up a default Filter that users will see when they click the ellipsis to select an entry for a Trackor Selector or Multiselector field.
Linking Filters to a Components Package
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