Hi! First time poster. Thanks, everyone, for the help here.
I’m setting up my first dashboard filter and want to understand the logic.
If I have a question card on my dashboard, where the original question query itself uses some filters, but then a dashboard-specific filter is applied, does the dashboard filter operate on the (pre-filtered) result set of the question, or does the dashboard filter replace the filters on the original question?
Hi @smurray
If you have created a question - let’s call it “Q1” and you have defined some filters, so it only returns 100 rows (let’s say you have 500 rows in total in your table).
And then create another question “Q2”, which is using “Q1” as it’s base (called Saved Questions), and you set a filter, so it only returns 20 rows (out of the 100 rows it would return).
Then add “Q2” to the dashboard and connect some filter - when you apply the dashboard filter, then you’re filtering the 20 rows that “Q2” is returning - you’re not replacing the filters in Q2 or Q1.
If you want to be able to do more filtering directly on the dashboard, then you would probably just use “Q1” on the dashboard (and perhaps have even less filters on “Q1”).
It comes with it’s own downsize, since you’re querying more data. Read more here:
https://www.metabase.com/learn/data-diet/analytics/making-dashboards-faster.html
You might also want to read this article:
https://www.metabase.com/learn/building-analytics/dashboards/bi-dashboard-best-practices.html
@flamber Thank you! Yes, this is perfect and a very clear explanation. This is how I hoped dashboard filtering worked; it’s just not stated explicitly on the docs page I linked to.