Value filters are used to focus a view on specific data by looking at Field values in your data. (They can also filter on Derived fields and Formulas.) They are used (usually in combination with Category filters) to limit what entries are shown in a view.

You can apply and change value filters as you go, expanding or narrowing the range of entries you see in the view.

If your application contains Person entries with a field called “Last Name”, you can add a filter to a view to find people with a particular name, e.g. “Smith”.

How you operate value filters depends on the type of field value. The examples show the name of a field and the value filtered.

Examples of filters

• Text value fields have a text box for you to type specific text to filter.

• Numeric fields (Number values, Money values, Duration values and Date and time values) also have a text box. You can type a specific value and use mathematical expressions like greater than and less than.

• Other fields (Choice values, Dabble user values, Link to entry and List of entries) often have a selection box to let you filter for a specific choice.

There are many ways to add a value filter. The easiest is to use the column menu in a Table view or simply type something into the box beside the Add filter button.

Typing a value filter

When you type a word that Dabble recognizes as a field or column in your view, each matching field or column will appear below the search box. Click the Filter button beside the match to add that filter. Or, if you simply want a keyword search, click Search.

Once added, a filter will appear in the filter section with the appropriate text or selection box for you to edit. In all cases, if you leave the text box or selection blank, the filter will not affect the view (it will match everything). This allows you to keep a filter handy for when you need it but not always use it.

Normally, value filters limit the view to entries that have a particular field value. You can also choose to match entries that do **not** have a particular field value. Click the word “is” (or “includes”) to change it to “is not” (or “does not include”).

Click to exclude matches

When you filter for text or a number, you can do more than just match text. You can use a “wildcard”, the asterisk character (*) to do partial matches, and for numeric fields, you can use less than and greater than.

Dabble also recognizes the word “anything” which matches a value that is not empty or blank. You can write “not anything” or exclude matches on “anything” to find values that are blank.

You can also use the semi-colon to separate multiple possible values — in other words, to filter one value or another in a particular field.

Here are examples of different filters you can write:

• “banana” — matches entries with the word banana in them somewhere

• “Fruit: banana” — matches entries whose Fruit field contains the value banana.

• “Fruit: apple; banana; pear” — find entries whose Fruit field contains either apple, banana or pear

• “Fruit: not apple” — matches entries whose Fruit field does not contain the value apple.

• “Fruit: a*” — matches entries whose Fruit field value starts with the letter A.

• “Fruit: *e” — matches entries whose Fruit field value ends with the letter E.

• “Ingredients: < 9” — matches entries that have a number less than 9 in the Ingredients field.

• “Birthday: >= January 1, 1980” — matches entries that have a date equal to or more recent than January 1, 1980 in the Birthday field

• “Time: > 5h” — matches entries that have a duration of greater than 5 hours in the Time field

When writing a value filter for a date and time field, you can use keywords like “Today”, “Tomorrow” or “Friday”, the meaning of which will always be applied in context. So, for example, you can have a filter that limits entries to those that include today’s date, and the meaning of “today” will always be current. You can also use “before” and “after”, and “from now” and “ago”. For example, “Date: before 7 days from now” would filter for entries whose Date field is any date up until 7 days in the future. “Date: after 6 months ago” would find entries more recent than 6 months ago. See the Date and time values page for more examples of the words and usage Dabble understands.

When filtering on fields containing Dabble user values, you can use the keyword “me” to refer to yourself. The advantage of this is it allows you to save a view that will automatically be personalized for each user of the application. For example, if you create a calendar, you could use the “me” keyword to limit the calendar to only show the current user’s events without needing to save a separate calendar view for each user.

When writing advanced filters, certain words and punctuation characters have special meanings, so it’s not possible to search for these values. Here’s the list of these special values:

• : — used for specifying field names
• ; — used to separate multiple possible values (either one value or the other)
• <, <=, >, >=, after, before — used with numbers and dates
• today, yesterday, tomorrow — used with dates
• now — used with dates to mean “today at the current time”
• from now, ago — used with dates to mean “in the future” or “in the past”
• !, no, none, not — specifies that matches should be excluded
• any, anything — matches any value
• all — match if all entries are included in a list of entries field
• * — specifies a wild card for text fields