Pass Tableau Filters via URL using FILTERVALUES

 

There are several scenarios where you might want to be able to pass the currently selected filters to another workbook (or a related URL) using URL actions. One I see regularly is the need to jump to another workbook and use the same filters. Typically, this workbook is a heavily used “utility” workbook. It might be a tool for deeper analysis, downloading the data, or something else. To avoid including that same content in every workbook, necessitating the need for maintenance of duplicated content, you might create a single workbook that is accessible to everyone who needs it, then simply link to it. So that your users don’t have to re-filter the target workbook, the ideal is to pass your currently selected filters to that workbook automatically.

 

Another common scenario is to leverage Andy Kriebel’s “Greatest Tableau Tip Ever” which allows you to easily download data in a csv format. Our blog has referenced this several times, but if you haven’t already read about this tip, then please stop and go read it—I’ll wait…

 

This tip is such a great way to download your raw data (see 3 Methods for Excel Download Buttons in Tableau for some other options). And, just like a workbook, you can pass filters via the URL in order to filter the downloaded csv! In fact, this was the premise a guest blog written by Ethan Hahn a few years ago, Allow Users to Export Their Filtered Selections to Excel. We’ll come back to this shortly, but let’s first talk about the basics of how you can filter a workbook (or csv using Andy’s method) using URL parameters.

 

URL Structure

As detailed on How View URLs Are Structured, the base URL on a Tableau Cloud or Server environment will look something like this:

 

http://<servername>/#/views/<workbook>/<sheet>

 

In a multi-site environment, “site” and the site name are inserted into the URL like this:

 

http://<servername>/#/site/<sitename>/views/<workbook>/<sheet>

 

For Tableau Public, the URL will look something like this:

 

https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/<profilename>/viz/<workbook>/<sheet>

 

But we can also add filters to the workbook. For example, let’s work with the following workbook from Tableau Public:

 

 

The URL is:

 

https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/ken.flerlage/viz/Map_16923008316680/Map

 

Let’s say that we want to filter this target view to only show Kentucky. The first thing we need to do is add a “separator” to the URL, in the form of a question mark.

 

https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/ken.flerlage/viz/Map_16923008316680/Map?

 

This essentially defines the end of the navigable portion of the URL (i.e. what website you’re going to) and the beginning of query strings. Next, we’ll add our filters by specifying the name of the field we wish to filter and the value. For example, to filter State to “Kentucky”, we add State=Kentucky.

 

https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/ken.flerlage/viz/Map_16923008316680/Map?State=Kentucky

 

 

If we want to filter to multiple states, we just add a comma then add the additional state. For example, to add Pennsylvania, we do this:

 

https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/ken.flerlage/viz/Map_16923008316680/Map?State=Kentucky,Pennsylvania

 

If we wish to add filters on other columns, we add an ampersand separator then repeat the process. For example, let’s filter to the Categories, “Furniture” and “Technology”

 

https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/ken.flerlage/viz/Map_16923008316680/Map?State=Kentucky,Pennsylvania&Category=Furniture,Technology

 

Note: If you have spaces or special characters in your filter names or values, then things can get a little hairy as those will often need to be encoded in the URL. In some cases, the browser will take care of this for you. Chrome, for example, will replace spaces with “%20”, but other characters can be problematic. Question marks and ampersands, for example, can cause problems. Fortunately, there’s a relatively simple solution to this problem that we’ll deal with momentarily.

 

In addition to filters, we can also pass values to parameters using the exact same method (since parameters are single-select, you would only ever pass a single value).

 

Our Scenario

Now that we have this basic understanding of the structure of URLs and how to pass filters and parameters to them, let’s return to the scenario discussed earlier. We want to be able to pass all of a workbook’s current filters to a URL automatically. To do that, we essentially need to read the values of all the filters and then build the URL. So how in the world do we do that? That brings us back to Ethan Hahn’s blog, Allow Users to Export Their Filtered Selections to Excel. In the blog, Ethan describes the use of a technique to create comma-separated lists of values using some clever table calculations. So, for each field with a filter, he uses this technique, creates the comma-separated list, then brings those together with the base URL to construct the target URL, including all of our filters! You can then use that URL within a URL action.

 

 

It’s a brilliant technique! And what’s great about it is that it has many more applications than just constructing a filtered URL. You could use this technique to display a complete listing of all the filters. As Ethan mentions, you can address the dreaded * in tooltips and show all the values. And I’ve used this comma-separated list of values to do things like create dynamic titles based on filters (see our TC22 presentation for an example).

 

But those table calcs are tricky and a lot of work. Fortunately, there is a longstanding, though under-publicized trick that makes this process much easier—a handy little function called FILTERVALUES.

 

For this example, let’s imagine we want to pass filters from our map…

 

 

…to a workbook containing a detailed table:

 

 

Note: I don’t typically love using tables as they don’t leverage preattentive attributes in the same way as charts, but it works well for this example because we’ll be able to clearly see the filters being applied.

 

The base URL of the table workbook is:

 

https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/ken.flerlage/viz/PassFiltersviaURL-Table/Table

 

Our map has filters on Region, Segment and Category so we want to pass those filters to the table URL. We can bypass all the complex table calculations and simply use the FILTERVALUES function within the URL action. We’ll create the URL action, paste our base URL, and add our question mark separator. Then we add the filter want to use, Region=, then <FILTERVALUES(Region)>

 

https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/ken.flerlage/viz/PassFiltersviaURL-Table/Table?Region=<FILTERVALUES(Region)>

 

 

This will instruct Tableau to grab the filtered values and pass them in the URL action. It’s as simple as that!!!

 

We can do the same thing with the Segment and Category filters, resulting in:

 

https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/ken.flerlage/viz/PassFiltersviaURL-Table/Table?Region=<FILTERVALUES(Region)>&Category=<FILTERVALUES(Category)>&Segment=<FILTERVALUES(Segment)>

 

And that’s all there is to it! Just to prove it works, here’s a short video showing it in action:

 

 

Note: I’ve had some mixed results when testing this in Desktop, but once published to Cloud/Server/Public, it works beautifully!

 

Additional Considerations

There are a couple of things we need to consider when using this. First, you may be thinking that FILTERVALUES could be of great use elsewhere (e.g. for displaying a list of filters on screen). Unfortunately, it appears to only work within URL actions, so don't get any funny ideas!

 

Second, it’s important to note that some browsers have maximum URL lengths while others have no limit at all. Of the most popular browsers, the lowest maximum is 2048 so you’ll want to try to keep your URLs shorter than that. If you have a lot of items in your filter, you could hit this very quickly, so be careful!

 

Another consideration is the encoding. As I mentioned earlier, some special characters need to be encoded when used in a URL. Fortunately, Tableau makes this easy for us. Within the URL Action dialog box, under the Data Values section, there is a checkbox that allows you to encode values automatically. Just check that box and you should be good to go.

 

 

The final consideration is the fact that FILTERVALUES, at least from my experience, only works with discrete filters—it cannot handle continuous filters. Theoretically, we could replace continuous filters with parameters defining a min and/or max value, then add those parameters to the URL. Unfortunately, I found that this actually breaks the FILTERVALUES for some reason (a bug perhaps?). So, if you have a need to pass continuous filters, then that could create some problems with this technique.

 

Closing

While this method does have a couple of potential pitfalls, it should work for most use cases and it’s super simple!! I will admit that I only learned about this just recently, even though it seems to have been around for quite a long time. I have found almost no resources, including the Tableau documentation, that talk about it (other than a handful of forums posts), so I’m guessing it might be new to you as well. I certainly hope this simplifies your life when you eventually need to do something like this. Thanks for reading and please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. If you’d like to experiment with the sample workbooks shared in this blog, you can find them here: Map and Table.

 

Ken Flerlage, September 5, 2023

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