Operations Dashboard - Allow custom categories

[MeganFong]

Sometimes, features may need to have multiple values in the same field. Since a feature cannot take multiple coded values, I have put the values together for each feature using a comma delimiter, like how Survey123's select multiple does.

For example:

Unit	Activity
1	A,C,D
2	B,C,E,G
3	F
4	E,F

And so on. A lot of activity combinations can occur. I want to be able to filter by having a checkbox for each activity so that my map and widgets reflect my selection like this:

A
B
C
D
E
F
G

Currently, categories by grouped values takes each activity combination as a unique value; it doesn't recognize ',' as a delimiter. Custom expressions could help in this case, as a wildcard statement along the lines of WHERE Activity LIKE '%C%' as the category and C as the label would find all the units with activity C. I've tried something like this by overriding categories in the grouped values option, and inputting similar statements under the defined values option rather than grouped values, but it turns out that the category must be an exact match to the field value.

Allowing custom expressions to create my own categories (or an ability to specify and recognize delimiters to automatically create categories) would be useful.

[Trippetoe]

this sounds like the functionality i suggested as well (manually grouping multiple categories into a single category 

https://community.esri.com/ideas/15668-allow-multiple-categories-to-be-grouped-manually-in-a-pie-cha...).  

I wonder if we can combine them to get a more significant 'push'

[patrickb]

Data expressions can be used to create custom categories. 

[ChelseaRozek]

Hi @patrickb, can you explain how data expressions can help here? I use "defined values" to make the choices I want for the category selector. The issue is the behind-the-scenes query used to filter. Instead of find all that = 'VALUE', we want to find all that are LIKE '%VALUE%'. Using data expressions as the source would break down all the interconnectivity of the dashboard's widgets' actions and cause performance issues as mentioned in the other post.

@MeganFong maybe you should rename the idea? I think we're in the same boat and it's not defining the custom categories that's the issue, it's how they're used to filter records.