User-Specific Saved Filters and Table Views for Asset Management

[dschipfel]

Current situation

The asset table view is a great way to manage and review assets. However, every user currently sees the same view and filters must be reapplied each time the page is opened.

In practice, different users are interested in different asset types and categories.

For example:

• One administrator may only work with laptops and mobile devices
• Another may focus on servers and network equipment
• Some users may never need to see specific asset types at all

Suggested improvement

Allow users to customize and save their own table views and filters in the Asset Management module.

Possible features:

• Save personal filter settings
• Save column layouts
• Hide specific asset types
• Define a personal default view
• Create multiple saved views
• Option to reset to the system default

Examples:

• "My End User Devices"
• "Network Equipment"
• "Servers"
• "Printers"
• "All Assets"

A user could, for example, exclude a specific asset type entirely from their daily view if it is not relevant to their work.

Benefits

• More personalized user experience
• Faster navigation and asset management
• Reduced visual clutter
• Improved productivity
• Better scalability for organizations with many asset types
• Less need to repeatedly configure filters

As the number of assets grows, user-specific saved views and filters would help each team member focus on the assets that are actually relevant to their daily responsibilities.

[edmozley]

Hi Daniel! @dschipfel

Thanks for this one - it is built, and it went further than you asked in one respect worth knowing about.

The asset table is a thin shell over a table engine shared by four modules, so rather than building this for assets alone I built it into the engine. Saved views work on the Assets, Tasks, Calendar and Change Management tables, and each table keeps its own, so an asset view never turns up on the tasks table.

Saving one. Get the table looking how you want it, then Save view in the toolbar. It keeps the visible columns, their order, the sort and every per-column filter, under a name and a description.

Multiple views, and a default. Save as many as you like. The star on any view makes the table open with it - so "My End User Devices" can be what you land on every morning, while "Servers" and "Printers" are two clicks away. Turn the star off to go back to the plain table, which is your reset to the system default.

Sharing. A view can be visible to only you, to one of your teams, or to everyone. It asks which team, because most people are in more than one - somebody in Service Desk and Infrastructure can share a server view with Infrastructure without the whole service desk seeing it. A shared view is readable by that team and editable only by whoever wrote it, so nobody has to ask "who changed my view?". Anybody wanting a variation saves their own.

The library. Views in the toolbar opens everything you can reach, searchable by name, by description, or by who made it - which is how people actually look for a view somebody else wrote. List or cards, whichever you prefer, and it remembers the choice. Each one shows its description, owner, who can see it, and when it was created, modified and last used.

Three things that are deliberate, in case they look like faults:

• The search box is not saved with a view. A filter is how you like to look at things; a search is a question you asked once. Reopening "Servers" tomorrow and finding three rows because of what you typed last week would be baffling.
• Editing a view changes its name, description and who can see it - not what it shows. Renaming something should not silently change what it does. Use Save view again to capture the table as it looks now.
• Your default is yours. Two people can have different defaults pointing at the same shared view.

One more thing worth saying: a view keeps working when the table changes underneath it. A column that no longer exists is dropped, and a column the view has never heard of appears where it normally would rather than vanishing - so a view saved today still works after a new column ships, and shows the new column.

---

Things to try:

1. On the asset table, hide a few columns, filter Type to Laptop, sort by hostname, then Save view and call it "My End User Devices".
2. Click Reset, then Views, then your saved view - the columns, filter and sort should all come back.
3. Star it, reload the page, and the table should open with it already applied.
4. Save a second one filtered to Servers, then use the library search to find it by name.
5. Switch the library between list and cards, close it, reopen it - it should still be on the layout you chose.
6. Share one with a team and ask a colleague in that team to look. They should see it, be able to use it and star it as their own default, but not be able to edit or delete it.
7. Try the same thing on the Tasks table - your asset views should not be there, and vice versa.

There is a new section in the in-app help under Asset Management and Tasks, and a wiki page:

https://github.com/edmozley/freeitsm/wiki/Saved-Table-Views