Use an OR filter in a Canvas Dashboard report

Transcript

The first thing you need to do before you can create a Canvas dashboard report is to create a Canvas dashboard. If you need help doing that, click the link below to view the Introduction to Canvas Dashboards tutorial.

Now open your Canvas dashboard and click on Add Report. Select Create Report under Create New Report. Then select Table Report and Create Report.

We’ll name this report Late Task Assigned to Me or Unassigned. And in the description we’ll give a little more detail. Show late incomplete tasks on current projects assigned to my home team that are either assigned to me or unassigned. And we’ll be able to see that up here in the tooltip when we need to. Starting with the name and description will help us remember the important details when creating our report.

Next we’ll show the columns we want to show in our report by clicking on the Build Table icon. Click Add Column.

Now we’ll type task in the search area to find the task folder. Because we want to look at tasks. Now we can open it and search for the project folder. Then search for project name.

This will be the first column in our report.

Next we’ll add a column for the task name.

And in this case we’ll select name and we’ll change the column label to say task name.

Now since this is a task report. It just uses the word name as a label. But we’ll change it to task name just for clarity. Then we’ll add another column for plan completion date. And another column for assigned to. And let’s add one more for percent complete. Next we’ll click on the filter icon to add our filter conditions. To add a filter first click on edit filter.

Then we’re going to click on add filter group.

The reason we’re choosing add filter group instead of add condition is because we want to create an or filter. That means we only want to see tasks that meet all of the conditions in the first filter group.

Or tasks that meet all of the conditions in the second filter group. Notice right now we have a total of 834 results. These are the number of tasks in our system that I have rights to see.

This is a good time to click on the tooltip by the report name to view our filter criteria. So we want to show late incomplete tasks.

We’ll start with late. Which is in the progress status field.

Click in the empty bar.

Then click on pick field and search for progress status.

Make sure you’re in the task object. Tasks and projects have many fields with the same names. And we’re using some fields from the task object and other fields from the project object in this report. So it can be easy to get them mixed up. Be sure to look here to confirm you’re in the right object or switch to the right one if you need to. We want the task object. Now we’ll type in progress status. And we want to see if it’s equal to late. Notice that the total number of tasks that meet this condition has changed to 409. Next we’ll add a condition to our group to specify that the task should be assigned to me, the logged in user. We can click here to add another condition in this case. Pick a field. Again, I got to come down here and click on task. Click on the assigned to folder. And then name. And we’ll select the wild card me the logged in user. You can see that only six tasks meet both these conditions.

Now let’s go start on our second filter group.

Click add a filter group.

This may come up as and. You can change it to or.

And we’ll add the progress status condition. Click task.

Progress status. Equal late.

Notice how the number of total results has changed again. That’s because it can either be late with me as a logged in user assigned to the task or simply late. Let’s add another condition.

Tasks that are unassigned. Assigned to name again. Where the name field is blank is null means blank.

Now we’re back down to two hundred and fifty eight results. We’ll keep adding conditions to each group. It doesn’t matter exactly which order you do it in. Just as long as you end up with all the ands in this group and the same ands in this group. With the only difference being one of the groups is looking just for the logged in user to be assigned and the other one is looking for no one to be assigned. Percent complete is less than one hundred.

Will tell us that the task is incomplete. Now we want to see if the project that the task is in is current. So in this case we do want to be in the project object. We want to look for status. And we want to see that it’s equal to current. Next condition the team that the task is assigned to. So one of the team folder.

Oops. We want to be sure we’re in task.

Team folder for tasks. And we want to see the name of the team.

We want to make sure that the team name is equal to where you’re going to use a wild card again here. We want it to be equal to my home team. Or it’s stated here as my default team, which means the home team of the logged in user. We’ll have the same conditions down here. OK, so let’s take a look at these and make sure we got them right. When it doesn’t say task in front of it, it’s because we’re in a task report. So anything that doesn’t have another object in front of it is going to be within the task object. So we’ve got the task object for progress status assigned to name percent complete. Status is the project status. So we can see project there is the right one. And then team assigned to the task.

Same down here.

And that’s how you use an OR filter in a Canvas dashboard report.

Save it now. And here’s our report.

You can see here that there are some tasks assigned to the logged in user. As well as some tasks that are unassigned. They’re all late and incomplete and on current projects.