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Product News & Updates

Grids and Filters

May 18, 2014 | Artem Liubeznyi

In today’s blog post we will take a deeper look at data grids in OroCRM, and the capabilities of our advanced filtering system.

Grids

Grids are perhaps the most commonly used UI elements in OroCRM. They are indispensable when you need to work with a lot of data – and CRM is all about a lot of data. So every menu item, be it Leads, Opportunities, Customers, Accounts, or Reports, will guide you to a page with a grid.

Grids in OroCRM are interactive. They not only display data about specific entity records, but contain links to these records’ pages. They are also configurable – so you can adjust the appearance and contents of the grids to your taste and needs.

Standard Controls

All standard grid controls are located on the top of it. Here’s what you can do with them:

Standard grid controls

Figure 1 – Standard grid controls

Export button (in orange) allows you to export grid contents in CSV format. Note that exported are entire contents of the grid, and not just the page you’re looking at.

Pagination control (in green) provides you the information about the grid page that is displayed, and the total number of pages & records in the grid. Buttons with arrows provide navigation between the pages. Number of pages in the grid depends on its configuration, see below:

Grid content controls (in violet). This group of controls allows you to:

  • Change the number of records displayed per page using the View per Page control
  • Refresh grid contents – you might need this if some entities have been changed by another user, and you want to see refreshed data
  • Reset the grid to its default view – that applies to all filters, records per page and sorting changes that you have made.

Note that by default all grids will contain 25 records per page. You can change this value in system configurations under System > Configuration > Display settings > Data Grid settings:

Data Grid Settings

Figure 2 – Data grid settings

Grid header (in pink) allows you to sort the records by column in ascending or descending order. To do so, simply click on the column header. (The grid on the above picture is sorted by Created At column.)

Row actions (in blue). Each row of the grid contains a shortcut to some quick actions, so you don’t need to navigate to the record page to perform these actions. The shortcut is three dots in the rightmost column, and action icons appear when you hover the mouse over the dots. These actions usually consist of standard View–Edit–Delete (if you have sufficient privileges), but the list can be expanded – e.g., the grid of Workflows will include Activate or Deactivate actions.

Mass action controls

Some grids might contain additional mass action controls. For now, they are only available for Accounts and Contacts, but more are to come in future releases.

Mass Action Controls

Figure 3 – Mass action controls

Mass action controls consist of two parts:

Entity selector – to perform a mass action, you have to specify the records you want to change in the first place. You can do this individually, checking each record’s row, or check the entire page or grid using the mass check control in the header. Note that checkboxes’ state is preserved when you navigate between the pages.

Mass action button is located on the right edge of the grid header, above the row actions “column.” This button contains the list of possible mass actions – e.g., for Accounts it will be Merge Accounts, and for Contacts it will be Delete.

Filters

Filters are great when you need to quickly pick out the records you need from the entire data pool, and don’t need the advanced capabilities of Segment builder. The Filter bar is located above the grid controls.

Filter Bar

Figure 4 – Filter bar

Note that not all filters may be visible by default. In the example above only the most commonly used filters are shown in the bar. To see the entire list, click on the Manage filters link and select or deselect the appropriate filters.

Manage Filters

Figure 5 – Manage filters

To apply a filter, click on its button in the bar, and specify your query in the control that appears. Note that filter controls might look different depending on the type of data you are going to filter – whether it’s textual, numeric, date or option set. See some examples below:

Editing a textual filter

Figure 6 – Editing a textual filter

This filter will select all people whose last name starts with “Jon” – e.g., all Jones, Jonsons and so on.

Editing a date filter

Figure 7 – Editing a date filter

This filter will select all records that were created between April 1st and 17th.

An applied filter

Figure 8 – An applied filter

After the filter is applied, its query will appear in the control, so you can easily recall how you have filtered the data. To remove a filter, simply click on a cross after the query.

 

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