Automatic Month Selector pick list from a specified Month/Year Range [Date Selector element]

[Conner-Schaak]

In ESRI Dashboards, you currently have two options for allowing users to navigate dates in context of month ranges: 

• Date Picker 
• Defined Options

I am proposing a third option:

• Month Pick List

Why?

For quick analysis, date picker isn't always practical for quick comparisons between specific month ranges. Users must manually select each beginning and end date, and if they are just intending to review a full month range, this certainly is too precise of effort for the intended result.

For this reason, I've always used defined options. 

Problem with Defined Options for Month List?

There's a lot of set up to build out the SQL date clauses. As time moves forward, the dates need to be redefined with new clauses. For multiple different month selectors, this implies significant setup per filter. 

Solution — Month Pick List option: 

Devise a third option for filtering dates that is month-specific. See the concept below in configurations to gain a rough idea of what it could look like. 

Range Configuration Concept: 

 

[Neal_t_k]

@Conner-Schaak while not optimal like you propose. You could achieve this functionality by calculating a text field in your feature layer based on your date field.  You could calculate it as "Year - Month" (i.e. 2025 - 01, 2025 - 02, etc.). You would need to calculate it with numbers instead of month names to sort properly, but then you could use that field in a grouped category selector set to select multiple.

[Conner-Schaak]

Thank you for that idea @Neal_t_k !

This is all pre-processed data that I update using a custom ArcPy script. I will look into adding another field calculation process for these dates that require a month pick list. 

[RPGIS]

Another workaround for something like this, which I am currently using, is to create a separate set of data in the data expression, such as a table, and using that table to filter the map and other widgets. You can set the table to show the ranges based on the data or custom data with one field to use as labels and the other as values.

[Conner-Schaak]

@RPGIS 

That's an interesting concept -- so you're essentially creating a reference table to store the [MONTH] [YEAR] information and as well as the range information. 

I'd be interested to see how that applies to the category selector, to filter date values inbetween each range. Thanks for giving your insights.