Understand filters

As you have seen with search, filters appear in grey boxes in the search bar.

In an Answer or a Liveboard, filters appear just under the title. For Liveboards, your filters apply to all Worksheet-based visualizations in the Liveboard.

If you ever find that your search or Liveboard does not appear to contain all the data you want to see, check for any existing filters and remove them by selecting the X that appears when you hover over the filter in the search bar.

Simple filters can be applied to searches in a few different ways. You can use the search bar or choose Filter from the column header or axis label. You can apply simple filters to your search, whether it shows a table or a chart. Your filters remain part of the search even when you change the visualization type.

When adding a filter from the More icon , in the column header or by selecting a chart axis, numeric columns and text columns provide you with the ability to include or exclude values, and a checkbox selector for the values. If the column contains a date, you can see a calendar selector when applying a filter. This is also where you can apply bulk filters.

Depending on the data points the filter is being applied to, search filters may be aggregated or non-aggregated in nature.

Filters applied directly on measure columns taken from the source table, Worksheet, or Model are non-aggregated. these filters apply to the non-aggregated data points. Non-aggregated filters are applied during the following flows:

Aggregated filters are applied when the underlying measure column itself is aggregated at some level. For instance, if sales data is searched at a city level, the output would be an aggregated column consisting of data points for total sales on a city level (not store or item type level). A filter on this column would look at these aggregated data points and apply conditions on them, rather than the underlying sales column. Aggregated filters are applied during the following flows:

If you have a large Worksheet or table with thousands or millions of rows, you may want to create bulk filters. You can paste in a list of filter values to include or exclude, without having to select the box next to each value in the filter selector.

Bulk filters can be very useful when you have a very large Worksheet or table. You can use them to filter a large list of values easily. For example, this is useful if you want to only search on a list of products that your manager sent to you in an email. You can cut and paste those values into the bulk filter box to quickly generate a report or chart that includes only those items of interest.

You can create a bulk filter by pasting a list of values, separated by commas, semicolons, new lines, or tabs, into the bulk filter box. This allows you to easily search a large list of filters repeatedly.

ThoughtSpot applies a specific logic to objects with more than one filter. For example, you may have a Worksheet-level filter, such as country=US. While searching on that Worksheet, you might want to add filters for specific cities. By default, ThoughtSpot limits your possible filter values to cities in the United States, since you have a Worksheet-level US filter. The first filter you apply on an object always limits the available filter values you see for your second and third filters, and so on. This is because if you have a country=US filter, and try to add a city=Paris,France filter, for example, this results in no data found.

When you access the filters modal in a search by selecting the filter icon , you see an option to Show unfiltered values. This option relates to objects with more than one filter. When you add a second filter to a search, ThoughtSpot only shows you values within the first filter you added. You may want to see all possible values without removing the first filter.

For example, you have a country=US filter on your search, but you want to see data for Paris, France. When you open the filters modal for city, you do not see Paris, France. You select Show unfiltered values and select Paris, France. Then you can delete the country=US filter. This is especially useful if you have many filters on an object, or if you are not sure what values the columns in your data have.

If your Answer or Liveboard has multiple filters, you can arrange them in the filter bar so that they are in a logical, coherent order. This makes it easier for viewers of the Answer or Liveboard to understand and use the filters on the Answer or Liveboard. Changing the filter order has no effect on the filter precedence. Changing the filter order in the UI doesn’t change the filter order in the TML file.

To change the order of filters in the filter bar, follow these steps:

A Worksheet filter gets applied every time that Worksheet is used. This means that for any search involving a filtered Worksheet, all Worksheet filters are applied before the search is submitted. So results are always filtered, even if the specific terms searched do not include the column(s) that are filtered.