Basics:Filter Presets and Subtotals

From Cerberus Helpdesk Wiki

5.1+

Filter Presets and Subtotals, each feature can potentially stand on its own but they are designed to work in parallel, so we’ll start by going over each one individually and then explain how they gel to create a new Overview-like feature.

Filter Presets

Filter presets is probably something you’re already familiar with in other software, the name sort of speaks for itself and the concept is simple, a filter preset is literally a saved search. If you take a look around the Helpdesk you should notice each “searchable” section includes a couple new filter boxes up top.

Tickets, tasks, time tracking, addresses, they all get their own search filters to play with on their respective pages, and they all generally work the same way. The right box is for adding filters to the left box, then you use the left box to save those filters as presets (or to load existing presets).

In the Cerb workflow filter presets fit somewhere between a quick search and a custom workspace. Unlike a traditional search, presets are reusable, they also don’t take up as much “space” as a workspace -- a saved preset does not get its own workspace tab or a worklist within it. Filter presets live above whatever content they’re filtering, so when you load a preset you’re simply refreshing the list below.

Adding filters

By now the filter boxes should be old news for Cerb veterans. In 4.x the side-by-side “filters” and “add filter” boxes were stacked in a sidebar on the left-hand side of the equivalent pages, but otherwise they’re basically the same. Like 5.x, each area had it’s own search boxes with the appropriate filters to choose from.

The 4.x version.

Regardless of the small interface change every thing works just like before, in 5.1 you use the right “Add Filters” box to add each filter individually. As in previous versions, every object type (tickets, tasks, opportunities) has its own set of unique fields/filers. Ticket lists would include "Recipient matches customer@*", "Mask equals AAA-00000-000", "Group in list Dispatch, Sales, Support".

• Check out how Closed/Waiting for Reply are represented in the last two screenshots, this is because 5.1 redid the common ticket statuses. Going forward instead of splitting each status into it’s own “filter” (Closed = Yes/No, Waiting for Reply = Yes/No, Deleted = Yes/No), the statuses have been merged into ONE filter using multi-checkboxes (Status = Open, Waiting For Reply, Closed, Deleted).

Saving presets

The “Filters” box on the left side represents the current search, each filter you add should appear in the expanding list. Once you’ve got your search fine-tuned like you want it, save the filters as a preset. At any time in the future you can reload that preset (its search parameters) to “regenerate” your saved search and show all the latest matches in the Helpdesk. When a search stops being useful to you, delete it. Presets are NOT shared across workers, any new presets you want to “share” will have to be constructed again manually for each worker.

The 'action' dropdown at the bottom gives you the following options:

• Filters

• Remove selected filters: Select a filter or two in your list and delete.
• Reset filters: Empties the filter list. This doesn’t always equate to a clean slate though, in some cases the appropriate defaults are restored (Status is Open or Waiting for Reply).
• Save filters as preset: If you have a configuration you constantly come back to, save it.

• All Presets: Saved filters are stored in the same dropdown, just select a preset to reload it (“New Customer Replies”, “Open Tickets from Example, LLC.”, Tickets Due Tomorrow”).

• (edit presets): Opens a “remove these” checklist of your presets, but does not give you the option to actually modify the filters or the name. There really isn’t a clean workaround, but this will work. Select the preset under “All Presets” to load the filters up top, click ‘(edit presets)’ and remove it so you can reuse the name. Notice the original filters listed are still visible, so go ahead and make your changes, click ‘Save filters as preset’, and save it under the old name.

Subtotals

Moving on to topic #2. Subtotals is the kind of feature where it’ll make sense once you see it visually, so let’s start with a screenshot and then I’ll explain everything in detail.

Subtotals is a universal ticket-sidebar similar to Overview, that shows you the number of corresponding tickets broken down into categories. By “universal” I mean no matter where you run it, you’ll get similar information with the standard breakdowns; “ticket-sidebar” infers that you only can use it in places like mail, ticket workspaces, mail history in organizations, or any list comprised of just tickets.

Since we’ll be talking about the new Search Tickets tab (in comparison to Overview), I’ll use it as the starting example for subtotals. Click ‘mail’, ‘Search Tickets’ and look for the aforementioned sidebar on the left-hand side to see if it’s already enabled, if you don’t see it, click the ‘subtotals’ link in the blue header of the nearby worklist.

Clicking ‘subtotals’ again will hide the sidebar.

The subtotals sidebar has three sections of information: status, group, and worker, by default I believe group is selected first. Click a header to display that section's ticket count.

• Groups will show you the number of tickets in each group (and bucket) matching your search: Dispatch, Sales, Support.
• If you select status it will show you the number of tickets Open, Waiting for Reply, Closed, or Deleted, depending on your search filters.
• And of course workers will show ticket assignments like Joe Geck, John Smith (Owner links).

Subtotals + Filter Presets

The key advantage of subtotals that we’ve been glossing over thus far is their dynamic nature. The categories and numbers are not static, they are dynamically adjusted based on what you filter by -- which is why I aimed all along to explain subtotals alongside filter presets. Both work in tandem as a unit, the filter presets up top control the output of the subtotals sidebar and vice versa. To see what I mean try and do a search on just one group by adding a filter (“Group in list Support”).

Notice the ‘group’ subtotal in the sidebar narrows its focus to just Support and removes the other group parameters immediately. Your search in effect dictated what subtotals are shown.

Now let’s do the opposite, try clicking ‘Inbox’. Notice the saved filters refreshed to include “Bucket in Inbox” and all the other bucket subtotals (Spam) faded away. This time, drilling into a specific area of subtotals changed the corresponding filters.

Something similar would happen if you searched for different ticket statuses,

• Filter: “Status is Open or Waiting for Reply” only displays those two subtotals in the ‘status’ window,
• Filter: “Status is (empty)” or “Status is All” would result in a full ‘status’ window: Open, Waiting for Reply, Closed, and Deleted.

Search Tickets (Overview)

Think subtotals kind of looks like Overview? It’s no coincidence…

Much like Links, Filter Presets and Subtotals are not just new features, they’ve wiggled their way into different components of the new 5.x Helpdesk. Occasionally when this happens a new feature will complement an old 4.x staple, other times it will overshadow an existing feature providing a better alternative. However once the overlap potential peaks, something new can outright replace said feature. This is exactly what happened in 5.1 with Overview – we’re not talking optional plugin here, it’s bye-bye.

• When you download the latest code, in Overview’s place you’ll see two new ‘mail’ tabs: "Search Tickets" and "Search Messages".

Plain "Search" is also gone.

Search Messages is sort of the odd man out and it’s something we’ll save for another time; but as the name suggests you can now search for individual messages (e-mails) instead of entire tickets (threads/conversations). Search Tickets on the other hand IS the literal replacement for Overview, and while it’s not a 1:1 replication, it’s about as close as the developers are shooting for.

On the surface they match up pretty well. The default preset filters -- select “Reset filters” from the dropdown -- are the Overview-like settings; the respective subtotals have corresponding Open and Waiting (for Reply) statuses, and the worker status is equivalent to the old Assigned box. Both Overview and the Subtotals systems of course show the number of tickets and have clickable categories (statuses, groups, and workers) to refresh the worklist next to it.

But there are a couple of major differences that spring to mind. These are pretty obvious if you’ve been following along but I’ll repeat them anyway:

• You can no longer see the full sidebar. In 4.x and 5.0 (remember this is a 5.1 change) you had three distinct sections all visible at once: Open, Waiting (for Reply), and Assigned -- in 5.1 you can still get the raw information but you have to change the point of view (status, group, worker).

• Changing categories isn’t always a click away like it used to be and it’s not quite as intuitive either. I’ll give you two examples:

1. If you click into a subtotal group like Support, the list on the right will of course refresh. But remember the filters up top and the sidebar itself will narrow its focus and remove the other group names around it. The only way to go back, see your other totals, and jump into a new focus (Sales or Waiting for Reply or John Smith) is to recreate the filters. You could manually add them back, however the easiest is way is to just restore the default Overview-esque filters. Simply selecting “Reset filters” from the Filters dropdown will do it.
2. With the old Overview sidebar if you wanted to look at Waiting for Reply tickets by group (Support), you’d just click the group in the “Waiting” section.

• With the default Overview-esque filters running in 5.1, to do the same thing you’d have to narrow your focus to “Waiting” first (click ‘status’ -> click ‘Waiting for Reply’).

• Then click back over to ‘group’ and click 'Support' from the list.

View preferences remembered

Back in 4.x we made you save any worklist customizations you wanted to retain between logins (Overview included). Things like what columns to expose, the number of rows per page, and the “sort by” column (Updated: Newest to Oldest) were all stored per-worker. Unfortunately what ended up happening is a lot of users forgot to click ‘customize’, “Save Changes” when they sorted by a different column so it wouldn’t stick -- columns and rows are done through the customize menu thus they’re saved automatically.

All this is gone in 5.x throughout the Helpdesk, including in regards to Search Tickets -- any changes you make will be restored the next time you log in. This also applies to the Subtotals sidebar that’s crucial to replicating Overview, once you turn it on (click ‘subtotals’) it will stay open for every session going forward.