Improve Filter widget to bring more dynamism and fluidity on Experience Builder

[JasonBOCQUET]

It's the replica of one of my question topic (and it maybe more an idea than a question i think) here : https://community.esri.com/t5/arcgis-experience-builder-questions/2025-plan-to-improve-filters-on-ex...

Hello, I want to ask and discuss the topic of filters.

In the past, with Experience Builder, filters were very limited. You could only filter on one layer. For example if you wanted to filter buildings by surface area on one side and view related transactions about these buildings in a table (from another data source) it wasn't possible to dynamically update the transactions based on the building filter.

Since 2024 with the introduction of Group Filter, it's now possible to achieve this. However, you still need to have a shared field between the 2 data sources. While this isn't too hard to manage by using SQL, it's conceptually frustrating to create unnecessary columns in your data model just to enable dynamic filtering across different data types.

I give you an example : in my case I have buildings, offers (e.g., if 1000 m² of a building is avaiable for sale) and transaction history (e.g., the 1000m² were sold for 5$). My users want to filter atthe building level, as this is their primary focus for analysis. They mayfilter by square meters, building type, etc and if an offer is actually avaiable on the building. So by a group filter I can filter by my "TAG_OFFER" field (it's just a yes/no information) present on the building table.

However, if i wants users to see transaction data for buildings with active offers, i'm forced to create the same "TAG_OFFER" field in the transaction table. And this is problematic because, in the conceptual model of our database, the transaction table has no legitimate use for this field. It exists only to make the transaction data dynamically filterable based on user selections for buildings.

Here's my point that I want to talk with you :

It's gonna be good if a filtering functionality in 2025 was developped to allow more dynamic filters between data sources without requiring the addition of unnecessary fields in unrelated tables.

The most efficient solution, in my opinion, would be this : If my building has an ID 'ID001', all related transactions and offers already have this building ID as a foreign key. When i filter on the building layer,  all other data source of data (preselected during widget configuration) should automatically filter based on this building ID.

And i know there are actions that can be set in the Map widget, but they require users to manually make a selection on the map, which is inefficient. 

What do you think about this ? I hope there will be improvments to filtering functionality this year. 

[LJackson29]

This would be so helpful - here is my use case: 

 I have an Experience Builder app in ArcGIS Online. The primary layer in the app is the Project layer which is related to the Nomination layer on GUID/Global ID. A nomination can have multiple projects (a project can have only one nomination). Using a filter widget, I filter the Projects table, and I would like the Nominations table to automatically filter at the same time. However, I cannot get the Nominations table to filter when the Project table filters. There is no option to action in the filter widget to filter data. I have an action setup in the Projects table - When Record selection changes -> Data -> Filter Records and connect the Projects and Nomination on GUID/Global ID. See the attached images (in the action image  SNP_Phase = Projects layer and SNP_Projects = Nominations). Does anyone have any suggestions?

Many thanks!

PS. My first option was to do this project in Dashboards, but the table widget in Dashboards does not allow you to sort or search. My 2nd option for this work flow was to create a joined table using a data expression, but the table widget no longer sorts and the search option no longer works when using a data expression and the data was slow to load with the data expression despite limiting it to the records and fields that I needed and no geometry.

WorkflowAction