I use data templates on almost every XP through API explorer or Excel.
One amazing thing to have would be a Trigger to “Omit a collection Item”. Think of this like a view-based filtering.
For example, let’s say you’re showing 10 company records, each with fields like Company Name, Number of employees, and address.
You could create a trigger to Omit any collection items where the Employee Text field is less than 5. In the trigger you would use the conditional arguments that are already built in (If Text Field is less than 5) There wouldn’t need to be any action criteria at all…if the statement is true, then the record is removed from the set. So if you had 3 company records that match the criteria, your collection now only has 7 of the 10 items in it.
Think about all the uses for this - you could use this for quizzes, filtering records, creating dynamic forms that change based on selected criteria, and even creating conditional-based digital signage playlists. Holy Wow.
This would also fill in the gaps for some functions that a lot of API’s can’t do. If an API delivers a lot of extra info for an address, but doesn’t allow you to filter by that item, such as open/closed status of a business, you could use this to omit any records of businesses that aren’t open.
I hope this is possible. Help me vote this one up!
Although I voted YES because I agree that some kind of filtering available directly at the “view” level (i.e. based on Asset properties and not the data source) could be helpful, I’d like to know more about the scenario you couldn’t achieve with the existing filtering mechanisms at the “model” level (i.e. data source), such as the off-the-shelf filters for Excel or the H-CMS, or filtering mechanisms like the ones offered by Airtable?
Feel free to switch to support if you need to share some private info about the APIs you’re using so we can take a look at them
Hi Seb,
In my opinion, this feature would be powerful for many reasons, for ALL users who use collections.
Here’s why:
For collections fed through an API, you don’t need an API call to tell items to show/hide. Therefore the response ‘should’ be very FAST to manipulate data, and work in the event of lost internet. Additionally, you are no longer limited to the functions/parameter of your API. You can create very special conditional filters based on the ‘asset values’ within your collection. For example, if the filtering parameter of your API doesn’t have functions for the a way to filter records by date …like show records from 4 days ago, you could use a converter on the date field to draw out what you need and use that with the “Omit Collection item” action to make it work. Or you could filter out Youtube videos longer than X seconds, images that are NOT jpegs, etc. (Why this granularity? because digital signage nowadays demands the right content to show in the right places - according to a variety of factors)
Headless-CMS: Yes, this would provide additional functionality to the Intuiface H-CMS for the same reasons mentioned above. More granularity and control over the shown data, without needed to build it into your API.
For standard collections with no data feed, this would be a huge improvement. Currently there’s NO way to filter collection items without a data feed! For example, you could place 10 pictures of staff into a collection, then use a button to tell the collection to filter out all pictures with file names (or even better Asset names!) that don’t equal “Alex”. Or you could make an offline multi-form quiz, or survey. As the user touches through your form pages, you can show/omit items based on chosen criteria (again, via asset name, such as the name of a group)
@Seb, you gotta get on board with me for this one. If this is possible, it’d be a major improvement on many levels.
Hopefully others who use data feeds a lot can chime in. Or let me know if I’m not explaining something well enough. I’ll do my best to clarify.
Basically, I just want triggers to omit collection items at the Collection level, based on conditional criteria for assets or groups contained in that collection.
Like you I’ve been in situations where I wish I had that flexibility. Because the API didn’t have that filter I needed, or because there was no data feed, I had to find other solutions to make this filtering (omitting) possible.
In the case of the API, I implemented a custom Interface Asset to add that filtering mechanism at the client level.
In the case of no data feed, I “pushed” the customer into organizing his content into a data feed, which he didn’t like at first, because designers hate Excel and “ordered things” by design (pun intended), but eventually liked when he realized he had much more content to add afterwards and how easy it was.
So yes, having filtering mechanisms at the collection level would make the life of some Intuiface designers much easier and would enable to implement some behaviors in a much faster way.
Not having that feature, it’s more work, it might require more skills (IA development), but it’s still doable today
