Active Selection view/hide panel

Paul Wyatt

Introduction

BOARD allows for developers to switch on or off a flag allowing current selections to be applied to another screen.  However, this method, has a number of problems in that firstly, it is hard to keep track of the current selections; substitution formulae does not function correctly on html5 platform.  Also, it is hard to know when to apply the current selection and when not to, say when moving to a global 'search' screen.

 

Gerrit Kohrs  @SDG Group has already suggested a very good idea regarding selections here and I wrote a response in support of his idea.  However, I'd like to suggest an alternative approach in the hope that one or other may be more practical to incorporate into a future BOARD edition sooner. 

 

The Idea - Visual semi-permanent selections

I would like to suggest that a selection tracker panel be present where the user can view/hide it at will.  On selecting a new screen, the current selections and the selection panel remain active and so immediately applying the selections to every subsequent screen opened offering an immediate visual confirmation of the selections in use.  Additional functionality would be an [x] function to accompany each active selection, allowing the user to de-select entities if so desired.  Such a feature would be easy to use and understand and allow users to immediately verify their active selections.

 

In practice, such a feature might simply expand on the selection icon functionality already available: 

I do appreciate that the 'Range' selector achieves this (although there is no user control to have the selections persist and selectively switch off) but the 'Range' selector offers too much info and all entities.  Also, the selections cannot be retained unless the developer has 'foreseen' the need; we're good, but even we struggle with this one.

 

I'm convinced that between all the ideas on selections, there is a very simple solution. In achieving it, I think developers and users alike would find BOARD more enjoyable to use and organisations would save on training and development costs caused by this issue.

 

I've already seen posts of colleagues on this site discussing the saving of selections into holding cubes split by users.  This is currently the only stable way of achieving this functionality but it is fundamentally flawed as it requires database security 'SELECT @User' and an OLAP write procedure for each user to use and a cube for each entity selection (or a hypercube for the truly masochistic).

 

If you agree with this idea, please vote it up.  If you have a truly inspirational way to achieve persistent selections from one screen to another, please share your method.

Product Management Team

Thank you for sharing your insightful suggestion with us, Paul. Your time and effort are genuinely valued. 

While we're not proceeding with your idea at the moment, this decision is based on our updated product enhancement and idea lifecycle processes, introduced in 2023 (details in our Idea Exchange FAQs). 

Despite this, if you believe your idea still holds relevance, we invite you to resubmit it for review under the new guidelines. We're dedicated to offering the best user experience and prioritizing features and enhancements that significantly impact everyday usage of our software. 

Your input is crucial to our community, and we sincerely appreciate your participation. Please keep those creative ideas and feedback coming – we always look forward to hearing from you. 

Thank you again for your understanding and continued support.

PS: Please do have a look at the Idea Exchange FAQs to know more:  https://community.board.com/kb/articles/1095-idea-exchange-faqs