topic Re: Category selector Defined Values contains not working in ArcGIS Dashboards Questions

Category selector Defined Values contains not working

Ellie_Linden — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 14:00:28 GMT

I would like to use a Category selector that filters a field with strings separated by semi-colons. I believe this should be possible when using “Defined values” and setting the operator to be “contains.” However, this does not seem to be working with my data. Is anyone else having difficulty with this? I can see this should be possible from this blog post: https://community.esri.com/t5/arcgis-dashboards-blog/dashboards-that-pop-category-selectors/ba-p/1551269

Re: Category selector Defined Values contains not working

JenniferAcunto — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 13:11:48 GMT

It works. However, because you are using Contains, you have to be aware of values inside of other values. For example, filtering for 'fish' will find 'fish' and 'dogfish'.

Re: Category selector Defined Values contains not working

Ellie_Linden — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 13:33:07 GMT

Thanks Jennifer, I don't believe there are cases where values are hidden inside of other values, although I'll definitely keep an eye out for that - thanks for flagging it.

I did just find a workaround, but still a bit perplexed what is causing it and it will be tricky to apply on a larger scale. To get the "values" I was defining, I originally used R code to create a dataframe of unique strings, exported that as a csv, then copied the values from a csv into the Category selector. When that didn't work, I also I tried copying the values from a text file to be safe/ensure no hidden spaces were present. That didn't work either, leading to my original post.

I just tried going into the configuration settings of one of the indicator elements I wanted to filter, clicked the upward arrows to the right of "Data table," then copied the value from that table and pasting into the Category selector, and it worked. I am currently using a dummy dataset with only 6 unique values so it wasn't a big deal to scroll through the table to find them, but the full datasets will have hundreds of values (which was already going to be time-consuming pasting from a text file). Could this possibly be some type of bug, or is the way I was doing it from R --> csv file --> text file not the best workflow?

Thanks very much for any help you can provide!

Re: Category selector Defined Values contains not working

SteveMarkovick — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 22:29:10 GMT

Odd behavior like this usually comes down to how the defined values are evaluated under the hood. I’ve seen category selectors ignore “contains” when the field type or casing isn’t exactly what the widget expects. Swapping to an expression or normalizing values upstream sometimes fixes it. Debugging feels clunky here, but once the logic clicks, the selector behaves again.