[8.0 Research] Filter Improvements and Alignment

[clintandrewhall]

Summary of Exploration or Proposed Change

Outline what is being proposed. Explain how this is a breaking change, and why it's important to complete. Discuss the consequences of not completing this change for 8.0.

Findings

Summarize the findings of the research. Be as detailed as possible and appropriate. Link to any feature branches or other documents, as appropriate. Fill out the list below according to our planning strategy.

• Proposed Priority:
• Level of Effort:
• Dependencies (if any):
  • [Teams/Projects]
• Proposed development: [7.x]

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/kibana-presentation (Team:Presentation)

[crob611]

Here's my dump of thoughts on Filtering as it exists currently in Canvas, and exploring ditching Canvas style Filters for bringing in the Filter Bar that is already familiar:

Filtering Alignment

Filtering in Canvas is unique from other applications in Kibana as it does not have the typical Filter Bar that users are accustomed to from Dashboard, etc. Instead, Canvas relies on elements which create filters. So instead of a filter bar with a KQL search and a timepicker, Canvas could have multiple drop down menus to filter on specific fields, as well as multiple time pickers to filter on multiple time fields. Users can also pick and choose which filters get applied to which visualization in a Canvas Workpad (via filter groups). This gives a lot of flexibility with how your elements in a workpad can be filtered, as every filter does not have to be applied. (Versus a KQL filter in a dashboard is applied to every panel)

Current difficulties with Canvas filters is that it is very easy to get confused by which filters are being applied to which elements. We have an open issue with design to make it clearer how an individual element is being filtered #50984

So, what could we do to bring filters into alignment.

I'm going to explore the idea of ditching the way filters are currently done in Canvas and bringing in the filter bar which is already familiar to everyone.

• One of the nice things of the Canvas filters is that they can become part of the "display" of the workpad. You get an element on the page showing the dropdown and showing the chosen value. We would lose this functionality, so we would need to figure a way, maybe some new elements, that just spit out human readable version of a filter?

• We would need a way to be able to include and exclude certain filters from the filter bar to get that grouping functionality
  - This could maybe just be a reworking of the "Filters" function to grab filters from the bar and some kind of new ui to do the creation of the filter groups
  - New elements could be created to display filter values if needed?
  - Would need a specific UI for creating groups? Could this become part of the filter bar?

• We could also bring the "filter groups" concept to dashboard (maybe other apps) so that dashboard could do the filtering in multiple ways in a single dashboard and this filter grouping concept wouldn't be unique to Canvas.

This would be a breaking Canvas change as we would have elements that no longer work and would need to be removed from workpads. Filter values are currently saved on those elements in the workpad, so they would likely have to move to the root of the workpad and interacting with the filter bar would mess with that, etc.

I know there has also been some ideas of making dashboards be expression based, and if that were the case, then bringing the filter bar => filter group idea and function would be simple to bring across. I don't think this would cause any breaking changes for Dashboards as they are already using Filter Bar, so it would likely be a non-breaking change if we were to introduce the grouping concept.

[Heenawter]

Closing because this no longer fits on our current roadmap 👍