Are we ever going to get the ability to filter by Query fields? People have been asking for this for at least a decade, and we still don’t have it. Why has this never been implemented? It basically makes Query fields useless except for display purposes.
I always have to come up with ridiculous work-arounds just to see simple information generated by a query field. It’s mind boggling that after all these years that it’s still never been implemented.
Sorry if I don’t read as nicely as I’d like to, but this has been costing me time and money for several years. And it just burned me again.
Based on experience with other database systems too, I expect the query fields aren’t stored values, but values calculated only when the user triggers them to evaluate to display on the layout and, as such, they don’t have indexes. Without the index, the filter or sorting features would be impossibe (or so slow as to make us - and all our users - cry).
Exporting a found set to csv and sorting or filtering a set of records from there could work. Other times, when I want this behavior, I set up another field and have an event plugin trigger to populate it as a stored value. It is more work upfront, but more reliable and flexible for how we might want to use it.
In addition, as a stored values your users may see some other benefits:
less of the “Calculating…” values when loading a large page with slow claculations/queries
we have seen use cases where the query fields were too slow to allow a found set to export to csv, but the exports worked great once the values were calculated and stored by the event plugin instead.
If they can make a query field that does this, then they can make a query filter. I’m not saying to filter a query field’s output in this case, I’m saying gives us full query capabilities in a custom filter then. Or change the query field to be a dynamic entity or something. It’s kind of ridiculous that it’s so difficult to get conditional data filtered without going to an external source. Know what I mean?
Curious what the example is for “full query capabilities in Custom Filter” would be. I think we have been able to do most of what we needed there, but there could be other use cases we haven’t come across.
It’s a bit of a hassel to set up the plugin work-around, but at least within my control. I’ve made lots of other feature requests that I don’t have a good workaround for (copying widgets or views to paste to another page, creating a studio-wide list-detail view for Projects, tracing where a fields is used in layouts/widgets/calculations/filters througohout the site so we could be sure if it was safe to delete, being able to put a calculated delay in a task template between the end date of a previous task and a start date of the current task…). If you submit a case to the website, they may give a you an ticket ID for a feature list they maintain internally, but you won’t be able to see or receive any follow ups to the feature request unless you specifcally make another ticket asking for an update.