How to Filter the Board in AgileZen
This documentation will take you through how to use the filtering feature in AgileZen.
Overview
Filtering allows you to focus on specific information on your board. By fading or hiding content that doesn’t apply to your filter, this feature makes it easy to focus on what’s most important to you right now.
To open the filter panel from the project’s board, click on filter in the upper right. From here you can either create a new filter or select a saved one.
See the new filters and saved filters sections for more information.
New Filters
Creating a New Filter
To create a new filter, open the panel by clicking filter on the top right and click the new filter button. This opens a text box where you can enter a filter expression. To apply the filter to the board, click apply.
By default, the filter highlights the stories that match and fades out the stories that don’t. This makes it easy to see what you want, while making sure you don’t lose the context. If you want to hide stories that don’t apply to your filter completely, you can click on the fade/hide button to toggle between fading and hiding cards that don’t match your filter.
Editing an Unsaved Filter
To edit a filter that is currently applied to the board, use the action menu on the right side of the filter panel. Clicking on edit will display the text box again. You can then make changes and click apply to re-apply the updated filter to your board.
Clearing an Unsaved Filter
To clear a filter that is applied to the board, just click on the un-apply button on the far right of the filter panel. This will remove the filter from the board and close the panel. If you want to save the filter for later use, see the saved filters section.
Filter Expressions
Filters are created using a special language, called filter expressions. Filter expressions consist of pairs of properties (like color) and values (like red) that you want to match. These pairs can be joined together using logical and and or statements, and negated using not statements. You can think of filter expressions as similar to typing queries into a search engine, but they allow much more fine-grained control over the results.
If you ever need help while writing a filter expression, you can click the question mark in the filter text box to pop up a quick guide. The guide also has a link back to this post if you need more in depth information.
Here are a few examples of the filtering format:
| Expression | Matches |
|---|---|
| color:green | All green stories |
| priority:important | All stories with the priority important |
If the value you’re looking for is more than one word, you
can use double quotes around the value, like text:"needs to
be fixed".
Filtering on Multiple Properties
As we mentioned already, you can filter on more than one property by using and and or statements. You can also use not to negate a pair (that is, match everything except what it describes).
Here are some examples of logical operations:
| Expression | Matches |
|---|---|
| color:yellow and phase:working | All yellow cards in the working phase |
| size:medium or priority:low | All cards with the size medium or low priority |
| not(tag:homepage) | All cards that don't have the tag homepage |
You can also use parentheses to group pairs together, like this:
| Expression | Matches |
|---|---|
| (color:red and text:"user interface") or (owner:nkohari and phase:design) | All stories which are either red and contain the text "user interface", or are owned by the user nkohari and are in the design phase |
| (color:green or tag:feature) and not(color:teal and tag:defect) | All stories which are green or have the tag feature, and also are not colored teal and have the tag defect |
As you can see, you can come up with some pretty powerful filters using the expression language!
Properties for Filtering
This table breaks down all of the properties you can filter on. Certain properties (like ''color'' and ''status'' ) have predefined values, which are also listed here.
| Property | Description | Values | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| color | The color of the story card | blue, green, grey, orange, purple, red, teal, yellow | color:red |
| createtime | When a story was created | Date in the same format as in your user settings | createtime>=1/12/2012, createtime<2/1/2012 |
| creator | The person who created the story card | Any part of the person's name or username | creator:nkohari, creator:"Nate Kohari", creator:me |
| deadline | When a story is due to be complete | Date in the same format as in your user settings | deadline>=1/12/2012, deadline<2/1/2012, deadline=today |
| details | The details of a story card, which appear on the story screen | Any part of the details | details:comment, details:"Some Text" |
| number | The number of a story card, which appears in the upper left | The story's number | number:123 |
| owner | The person who the story card is assigned to | Any part of the person's name or username | owner:nkohari, owner:"Nate Kohari", owner:unassigned, owner:me |
| phase | The phase (column) and story card is in | Any part of the phase's name | phase:design |
| priority | The priority of the story card | The priority value | priority:low |
| reasonblocked | The reason a story card is blocked, if it is blocked | Any part of the blocked reason | reasonblocked:design, reasonblocked:"more information" |
| size | The size (estimate) of the story card | The size value | size:large, size:2 |
| status | The current status of the card (see below) | planned, started, ready, blocked, finished | status:started, status:blocked |
| tag | A tag that is applied to a story | The name of the tag | tag:homepage, tag:ui |
| text | The text that appears on a story card | Content in the main body of the story (note this does not include a story's tasks) | text:"As a user", text:bug |
Story Status
The status of a story card reflects the current state of a story in the system. The possible values are:
| planned | The story card has not yet been moved to the board, and work has not yet started. |
| started | The story card has been moved to the board and is currently in-process. |
| ready | The story card has been marked as ready to pull to the next phase. (Stories that are ready to pull are marked with a green outline.) |
| blocked | The story card has been marked as blocked, indicating that work on it is impeded. (Stories that are blocked are marked with a red outline.) |
| finished | The story card has been moved off of the board, and work is complete. |
Saved Filters
Once you've applied a filter to your board, if you’d like to use it later, you can save it by selecting Save As in the action menu on the right side of the filter panel.
This will open a dialog box asking you to give the filter a name.
Once saved, you can load the filter again by clicking the Saved Filters button that appears when the filter panel is first displayed.
Sharing a Saved Filter
When you save a filter, you can also choose to share the filter with the rest of the people working on the project in which you created the filter. They will see your shared filter in the Saved Filters menu. Note that once you share a filter, any of your collaborators can edit and delete the filter – it becomes team property!
You can also toggle the sharing of a filter once it’s saved via the action menu. To share an filter that is not shared, click Share, and to stop sharing a shared filter, click Stop Sharing.
Editing a Saved Filter
You can edit a saved filter using the action menu on the right side of the filter panel, just as you can with an unsaved filter. To edit a filter that was previously saved, first load the filter, which applies it to the board. Then select Edit from the action menu to display the filter expression text box.
If you’d like to save the changes you’ve made to a filter, click the action menu and choose Save. You can also create a brand new filter using your changes by clicking Save As. If you click Save As, you will be prompted for a name for the new filter, and whether you’d like to share it with your team.
Clearing a Saved Filter
To clear a filter that is applied to the board, just click on the un-apply button on the far right of the filter panel.
This will remove the filter from the board and close the tab. Be sure to save any changes to the saved filter before clearing it from the board!
Deleting a Saved Filter
To delete a filter that was previously saved, first load it by selecting it from the Saved Filters menu. Then click on the action menu and choose Delete.
Selecting a Previously Saved Filter
To load a previously saved filter, click Saved Filters when you first open the filter panel. This will display a list of all filters available in the current project, including those shared by any of your collaborators. To load a filter, simply select it from this menu.