Saved Views

A saved view is a named, reusable way of looking at a list: which records it shows, which columns it shows, how they are sorted and grouped, and how many rows fit on a page. Instead of rebuilding the same set of conditions every morning, you pick the view by name and the list arrives ready.

What A Saved View Is

A saved view is a recipe, not a copy. It stores the settings — conditions, columns, sorting, grouping, merging, calculations, page size — but no records. Every time you open it, the list is built again from the records that exist at that moment. A record someone created five minutes ago appears in the view the next time the view runs; a record that no longer matches drops out.

Because the view stores no data, it can never be out of date in the sense of "holding old records". It can only be out of date in the sense that the list on your screen was drawn at a particular moment — see Refreshing The List below.

Your application's own wording for a saved view is query. You will meet that word in several labels: "Choose query", "Current query", "Available queries", "Save query", "Custom query saved." They all mean the saved view you are reading about here.

Why It Matters

Three things make saved views worth learning.

• Repeat work becomes one click. "Invoices overdue by more than 30 days, sorted by amount" is a view, not a five-minute setup.
• Everyone can talk about the same list. If your team lead publishes a shared view called "Escalations this week", every colleague who works on that screen sees the same definition of "escalation".
• The screen can open the way you want it. One of the views can be marked as your personal default, so the screen starts there instead of on whatever the application ships with.

The Saved-View Switcher

Reading The Current View

The filter bar — the strip of controls above the list — usually opens with a bordered button carrying a small caret. Its text is the name of the saved view you are currently looking at. That button is the switcher. Where the controls sit, and which of them appear at all, is decided per screen, so on some screens you may find it elsewhere in the bar.

If the current view has no name of its own, the button reads Choose query instead. That does not mean nothing is applied.

If you do not see a switcher at all, one of these is true:

• the screen offers only one view, so there is nothing to switch between;
• your administrator removed the control from this screen's filter bar;
• your administrator turned the whole filter bar off for this screen.

Opening It

Click the button. The list that drops down has two labeled sections:

A thin divider separates the two. Clicking inside the dropdown does not close it, so you can read the list without it disappearing.

Views you own carry a small red bin icon on the right of their row. See Deleting A Saved View You Own.

Switching

Click a name. The list reloads and comes back showing that view.

Switching starts you from a clean slate. Everything you had set up by hand on the previous view is discarded, and you are not warned first:

• filter conditions you added and applied
• the sort you clicked on a column header
• columns you added, removed or reordered
• groupings, merges and calculations you added
• the page you were on and the page size you had chosen
• the folder you had opened and the tags you had selected

The one exception is the small extra buttons your administrator may have placed in the filter bar (toggles, preset buttons, their own search box). Those stay switched on across a view change, which can be surprising if you were expecting a completely fresh list.

Example Ilona is on the Orders screen in the view "All orders". She adds a condition for Delivery country is Germany, applies it, sorts by Order date and switches to 100 rows a page. She then remembers she needs the "Unpaid orders" view and clicks it in the switcher. The screen reloads: the Germany condition is gone, the sort is gone, the page size is back to whatever the application uses, and she is on page 1. If she wants both things at once, she needs to open "Unpaid orders" first and add the Germany condition on top of it — and, if she does this often, to save that combination as her own view.

The Information Button

Normally to the right of the switcher and the star, a small circled "i" button appears only when the current view has a description. Click it and the description opens in a small panel; click anywhere else on the page and it closes.

Descriptions are written by whoever saved the view, so their usefulness varies. A well-written one answers the question the view's name cannot: what counts as "open", which office the numbers cover, who maintains it.

Example The shared view "Applications to review" carries the description: Applications submitted in the last 14 days that nobody has been assigned to yet. Excludes withdrawn applications. Ask Petra before changing this view. Without it, a new colleague would have to reverse-engineer the conditions to know whether withdrawn applications are counted.

Saving Your Own View

The Bookmark Button

The filter bar carries a bordered button with a bookmark-and-plus icon — normally at the end of the row that holds the Filter and Columns buttons, though its place is decided per screen. That is the save control. Click it and a small form drops down under the heading Save query.

If you do not see it, see When The Bookmark Button Is Missing.

What Gets Captured

The view you save is what is on your screen right now: the conditions you applied, the columns you have active and their order, the sorting, any grouping, merging and calculations, the page size, and — where the screen has them — the folder you have open and the tags you have selected. If you started from an existing view and changed some things, the saved result is that view's settings with your changes on top.

One thing is deliberately not captured: the page number. A saved view always opens on page 1, even if you saved it while reading page 7.

The Steps

1. Set the list up exactly as you want it — conditions, columns, sorting, page size.
2. Click the bookmark button in the filter bar.
3. Type a Name. This is what will appear in the switcher, so make it readable at a glance.
4. Optionally type a Description. Use it to record what the view is for and any rule that is not obvious from the conditions.
5. Decide whether it stays Private (see below).
6. Click Add.

A short message strip confirms with Custom query saved. The switcher immediately changes to show your new view's name — your view is now the selected one.

The rows on screen do not reload when you save. That is intentional: you were already looking at exactly this list, so there is nothing to fetch. Nothing is wrong.

The Private Option

The form has a checkbox labeled Private, and it is ticked by default.

If you do not see a Private checkbox at all, your account does not have permission to publish views to colleagues. Everything you save is then private, and there is nothing to decide. Ask your administrator if you need to share views with your team.

Publishing a view does not publish the records in it. A colleague opening your shared view still only sees the records and fields their own permissions allow — see Why Your Screen Differs.

The Name Has To Be Free

Names are checked before anything is saved.

• Saving privately: the name must not already be used by a shared or built-in view for that kind of record, and must not clash with another of your own private views. Names that colleagues used for their private views do not block you — you cannot see those, and they cannot see yours.
• Saving shared: the name has to be unused by any view for that kind of record.

If the name is taken, nothing is saved. A warning strip appears reading Query name already exists. Please use a unique one. The dropdown stays open with your text still in it, so you only need to change the name and click the button again.

Example Marek saves a private view called "This week". Later he tries to publish a shared view with the same name and is refused, because a shared name has to be unused by every view for that kind of record — including his own private one. He names the shared one "Deliveries — this week" instead, which is also clearer for everyone else.

Updating A View You Own

When the view you are currently looking at is one you own, the save form behaves differently:

• the Name, Description and Private setting are pre-filled from that view;
• you get two buttons instead of one — Update and Save as new.

Update rewrites that view in place: its name, description, visibility and its whole set of settings become what is on your screen now. If the view is shared, your colleagues get the new definition too, the next time they open it.

Save as new leaves the original alone and creates a second view from what is on screen.

For a view you do not own — the screen's built-in view, or a shared view a colleague published — you only get Add, which always creates a new view of your own. You cannot edit somebody else's view, and you cannot edit the built-in one.

When The Bookmark Button Is Missing

• You are inside a view built on a custom query. Those views cannot be saved as your own — see Views Built On A Custom Query.
• Your administrator removed the control from this screen's filter bar. Which controls appear, and in which order, is decided per screen and per layout, so the same person can have a save button on one screen and not on another.

Making A View Your Default

The Star

Normally right next to the switcher is a star. It is hollow when the view you are looking at is not your default, and filled in when it is. Its tooltip reads Select / unselect as your default query.

Click it once to make the currently selected view your default for this screen. Click it again to clear the default. There is no confirmation step, and the rows on screen do not reload — only the star changes.

The star always acts on the view that is currently selected, so to make a different view your default you switch to it first, then click the star.

What "Your Default" Means

Exactly two things, and no more:

• Only you. Nobody else's screen changes. Your colleague can have a different default, or none.
• Only this screen. A default set on the Orders list has no effect on the Invoices list, or on a second Orders list somewhere else in the application.

The choice is stored with your account, not in your browser, so it follows you to another computer, another browser and your phone.

From then on, when you open that screen without following a link that already names a view, the screen opens on your default instead of the one the application ships with.

If the star is missing, the screen has no other views to choose from, or your administrator removed that control from the filter bar.

Example Jana works only on complaints from the Brno branch. She opens the shared view "Open complaints", adds a condition Branch is Brno, saves it privately as "Brno — open complaints", then clicks the star. Every morning the Complaints screen now opens straight on her list. Her colleague Tomáš, who covers three branches, opens the same screen and still lands on "Open complaints", because defaults are personal.

Deleting A Saved View You Own

Open the switcher. Views you own show a small red bin icon at the right end of their row — including the one you are currently looking at. Views you do not own have no bin, and there is no other way to remove them.

1. Click the bin.
2. Your browser asks Delete custom query? Confirm.
3. A message strip reports the result: Custom query deleted.

Read the wording of that strip rather than its color: if the deletion could not be carried out, the message says Custom query could not be deleted. but may still be styled like a normal confirmation. If you see that text, the view is still there.

Points worth knowing:

• Deleting a shared view removes it for everyone. If colleagues were relying on it, tell them. If it was also somebody's personal default, their screen quietly falls back to the screen's usual view the next time they open it.
• The rows on screen do not change when you delete, even if you deleted the view you were looking at. The next time you open the screen, it uses whatever view applies.
• There is no undo. A deleted view has to be rebuilt and saved again.

Which Saved Views You Can See

The switcher is not a full catalog of everything that exists. What appears in it comes down to two decisions:

1. Your administrator decides which views a screen offers. A view exists for a kind of record, but it only shows up in the switcher of the screens it has been attached to. The same view can be offered on one Orders screen and not on another.
2. Private means private. A view someone saved privately is theirs alone. You will never see it, and they will never see yours.

Shared views themselves are not handed out role by role: on one and the same screen, the shared and built-in views on offer are the same for everyone who can open that screen. Where colleagues really do differ is in which screens they can reach at all, and in which records and fields those screens show them — see Why Your Screen Differs.

Within the dropdown the views are listed alphabetically by name, which is worth remembering when you name your own: a leading word like "Brno —" groups all your branch views together.

Example Karel and Alena both open the Projects screen. Both see "All projects", "My pipeline" and "Delivery board" — the views attached to that screen. Karel also sees "Q3 renewals", which he saved privately; Alena never will, by design. When Karel mentions a "Late milestones" view Alena cannot find anywhere, it turns out he means a different Projects screen in another part of the application, one that has that view attached to it.

Refreshing The List

What The Control Does

The refresh control is a bordered button with a circular-arrows icon. It normally appears in the filter bar next to the save button, and again in the footer beside the page selector. Both do the same thing.

In plain terms, refreshing means: run this exact query again, right now, and redraw the rows. It keeps every part of what you are looking at:

• the saved view you have selected
• every condition you added by hand
• your sorting, columns, groupings, merges and calculations
• your page size
• the page you are on — refreshing on page 4 leaves you on page 4

Nothing is cleared, nothing is reset. The only thing that changes is that the records are read again.

The button carries no text label and no tooltip, which makes it easy to overlook. It is the circular arrows.

Why It Exists

The list on your screen is a snapshot from the moment it loaded. Nothing pushes changes into it. If a colleague edits a record, if someone deletes one, if an automated process updates a hundred of them, your open list keeps showing what it fetched. It will keep showing that for as long as you leave the tab open.

Refreshing is the supported way to pull the current state. Reloading the whole page with the browser would also work, but it risks losing the conditions and columns you set up by hand, because much of that lives in the page address the application manages for you.

Example A support team works from a shared view called "Unassigned tickets". Ondřej opens it at 9:00 and sees eleven tickets. Over the next twenty minutes his colleagues pick up four of them, and two new ones arrive. Ondřej's screen still shows the original eleven, because nothing told it otherwise. He clicks a ticket that a colleague already took, and finds it assigned to somebody else — the row was simply stale. The habit that fixes this: click refresh before you take the next item off a shared queue. After the refresh his list shows nine tickets, and his filters, sort and page are untouched.

Two related habits worth having:

• On a shared work queue, refresh before you claim an item, not after.
• After you run an action that changes many records in the background, refresh to see the result. The list does not update itself when the work finishes.

What Refresh Is Not

• It is not a way to clear filters. Your conditions survive it.
• It is not an on-page search. For narrowing what is already drawn, see Filtering Your Data.
• On a very heavy list it can take a while, and if it takes too long you get the application's general error message rather than a stale-but-usable list — see Large Lists And Performance.

Page Size And Where It Is Remembered

The footer of the list has a button showing how many rows you are seeing out of how many there are in total, for example 20 / 1543. Clicking it offers a fixed set of page sizes, plus an "All" entry when the total is small enough to be worth showing at once. The control itself is covered in List Screens.

What matters here is where the choice lives:

Your on-screen choice is not stored against your account. Navigate away and come back and it is gone; switch saved views and it is gone; open the same screen in another browser and it is gone.

If you always want a particular page size on a particular list, put it into a saved view: set the page size, save the view, and star it as your default. From then on the screen opens with that page size everywhere you sign in.

Example Radek exports weekly numbers and prefers to see 100 rows at a time. Setting 100 each morning is four clicks. Instead he sets 100 once, saves the view as "Weekly numbers", and stars it. The screen now opens at 100 rows on his laptop and on the shared machine in the warehouse.

Sharing The Link To What You Are Looking At

While you work, the application keeps the page address in your browser in step with what you are looking at: which saved view is selected, and whatever you changed on top of it. That has two practical consequences.

• The browser's Back and Forward buttons step through your filter history, one change at a time, instead of leaving the screen entirely.
• You can copy the address out of the address bar and send it to a colleague. They open it and land on the same view with the same conditions applied.

Three caveats before you rely on it:

1. The recipient sees it through their own access. The link reproduces the definition, not the result. If the selected view is a private one of yours, if your colleague cannot open that screen at all, or if they may not see some of the records or fields, their screen will honestly differ from yours. This is not a broken link — see Why Your Screen Differs.
2. The link leans on the saved view. It carries which view is selected plus your changes on top. If somebody later edits that saved view, the same link produces a different list.
3. Inside a pop-up window the page address does not change. A list opened in a pop-up keeps its state with the pop-up, not in the address bar, so copying the address there gives you the page behind it. Open the screen in full first if you need a link to send.

Views Built On A Custom Query

Some screens are built on a custom query — a list your administrator assembled directly rather than from the ordinary conditions-and-columns machinery. You can recognize one by what is missing from the filter bar, and none of it is a fault.

On such a view you will not find:

• the Filter, Group, Merge and Calculations buttons
• the Columns button
• the bookmark button, so you cannot save this list as your own view
• the funnel icons in the column headers, and sorting from the headers does not take effect
• a working page-size choice — the footer button shows the total row count and does not open
• row checkboxes and the right-click row menu

What you do get:

• Named parameter chips, when the administrator built the query to accept them. Each chip shows a name and its current setting; clicking one opens a small form where you set the value. Change it, submit, and the list re-runs with the new value.
• The switcher and the star, so you can still move between the views the screen offers and make one your default.
• Refresh, which behaves exactly as everywhere else.

Example The "Monthly revenue by region" screen is built on a custom query. Barbora expects to add a condition for a single region and finds no Filter button. What she finds instead is a chip reading Region among the controls above the list; clicking it lets her pick one region and re-run the list. Anything the query was not built to ask for — a different date range, an extra column — has to be requested from her administrator.

Worked Example: "My Open Tickets, Oldest First"

The scenario: you handle support tickets, you only ever care about your own that are still open, and you want the oldest at the top so nothing ages quietly.

1. Open the Tickets screen and check the switcher. It reads "All tickets" — the screen's usual view.
2. Add the first condition. Click the Filter button, choose Assigned to, pick yourself, and click Apply filter. Nothing narrows until you apply it. Adding conditions is covered in Filtering Your Data.
3. Add the second condition. Filter again on Status, choose Open, apply. You now have two chips, and they work together — a ticket has to match both.
4. Sort it. Click the sort arrow in the Created column header until it points up, so the oldest ticket is on top.
5. Tidy the columns. Open the Columns picker and drop the columns you never read, so the table fits without sideways scrolling. See Columns, Grouping, Merging And Calculations.
6. Set the page size to whatever you can work through in one sitting.
7. Save it. Click the bookmark button, name it My open tickets, describe it as Open tickets assigned to me, oldest first, leave Private ticked, and click Add. The switcher now reads "My open tickets" and a strip confirms Custom query saved.
8. Star it. Click the star next to the switcher. It fills in. The Tickets screen now opens on this list every time you sign in, on any device.

What a colleague sees. Nothing changed for them. Your view is private, so it is absent from their switcher; their own default is untouched; the Tickets screen still opens for them where it always did. If you wanted them to have it, you would have had to untick Private when saving — and even then, their copy of the list would show their own tickets only if the condition were written that way, and would still hide any ticket their permissions do not let them see.

What happens tomorrow. The view stores no tickets. Overnight, new tickets arrive and some get closed; when you open the view in the morning it is rebuilt from scratch and reflects all of that. What it will not do is keep updating while you stare at it — for that, use refresh.

Tips And Gotchas

What To Ask Your Administrator For

Phrase the request in terms of the outcome, and name the screen.

• "Please make the view X available on the Y screen." — a view has to be attached to a screen before it appears in that screen's switcher.
• "Please let me publish views to my team." — sharing a view needs the Create public query templates permission. Without it every view you save stays private.
• "Please put the save / refresh / switcher control back on the Y screen." — which controls appear in the filter bar, and where, is decided per screen.
• "Please add a description to the shared view X." — so the next person does not have to guess what it covers.
• "The Y screen is built on a custom query and I need to filter it by Z." — that has to be built into the query itself; it cannot be added from the filter bar.
• "Please change the default number of rows per page." — that is an application-wide setting.

Related Chapters

• Filtering Your Data
• List Screens
• Columns, Grouping, Merging And Calculations
• Why Your Screen Differs
• Large Lists And Performance