Permanent vs temporary filters and sorts for specific views

It would be useful if there was a checkbox on each Filter and Sort option to make it permanent for that particular view.

Currently the way all filters and sorts work is as if they were permanent. Temporary filters/sorts on the other hand would be removed when the user views a different view, table or database (i.e. when they stop looking at this specific view).

This would be helpful for example in:

1) Ensuring a view remains true to what you labelled it as.
If I add an extra filter or sort when I’m trying to find some specific information in a table I don’t usually need it to remain there permanently. I often forget when I go back to this view that I have added those extra filters/sorts, so it makes me forget to look for specific data and I make decisions based off what the view title is rather than what the current filters+sorts are now. It would be better if views were able to “forget” extraneous temporary filters/sorts placed on them.

2) Reducing the amount of views made for a specific table.
I have many views for a specific table at the moment, each with only 1 or 2 filters/sorts different from another one. If I had this feature then I could instead reduce it down to only 4 views, and add an extra filter or sort to view them as necessary.

Hey there,

We plan to work on some more advanced features for filtering and sorting in the future, so we will keep in mind your idea. Thank you for your suggestion and for sharing the examples, they will be very useful while evaluating the feature’s importance.

One possible temporary solution @Teferi is if you click Share view and visit the view using the link, the filters applied on that link will be temporary. However this shared view link is read only otherwise and so might not be suitable.

Thanks for the idea, but it doesn’t quite work well for me as I need to frequently make edits regardless of the filters/sorts used.

That makes sense. Technologically we built this feature already for the publicly shared views, we just need to figure out the UX for how this works on a non public view/editable view. Some ideas we had already for the UX are:

  1. Any filters/sorts added or edited on a view are temporary by default. A green “save filter/sorts” button appears somewhere that you need to press to save your changes. If you try to navigate to a different view you are stopped by an alert which asks you to confirm if you want to throw away your temporary changes.
  2. The same as above, but you have to toggle this on this temporary edit mode on somehow first. Perhaps this value is remembered per user per view?
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Regarding point 2 @nigel

“Perhaps this value is remembered per user per view?”

That sounds like a cool idea actually. Instead of looking at it from a “temporary” and “permanent” point of view, we could look at it as a “user” and “workspace” point of view.

Every change made by the user is by default a user change and should only be persisted for the user but with an option to make the change available to the workspace by using a save button as you said.

I am also very much in favour of this change in general, I had similar issues when working with Baserow for undo/redo, I couldn’t filter for tasks assigned to me on our TODO view without messing it up for everybody :slight_smile:

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Maybe a simple checkbox next to each filter saying something like “apply to everyone” that if triggered makes this filter applicable to everyone viewing the view not just you.

Having a save-option for filter+sorting settings would definitely be a plus for Baserow. Filters/sorting vary greatly (for our uses) depending on the workflows, and rebuilding them every time you want to look at the data isn’t really desirable … basically, if one could have something like the “share view”, but sort of as a preset with description that can easily be selected would really be nice!