While it doesn’t exactly fall under the purview of an “intro” course, this is IMPORTANT to be aware of. Consider the following:
You manage a team of financial planners (really, insert your industry here—this is relevant for almost any team). You built a dashboard that aggregates up everyone’s Open Tasks, Sales Pipeline, Deals in Contracting, etc. Instead of building a dashboard for every single team member and adding filters to only show them their own data, you can build just one dashboard and then use URL Filter criteria to share that one dashboard with your entire team, but enabling everyone to just see their own data.
How to do this?
1. Build your dashboard (duh!)
2. Hit ‘Share’ and ‘URL/Permalink’. Select ‘Access with Login’ because all of your Zoho Users, by definition, have a login
3. Under ‘Specify URL Criteria’ you do exactly that—choose your filter. The ‘Variables’ available by default are the First, Last, Full Name, or Email of the user. If you have that data available as a column in your data, then you can choose the variable on which you want to filter. Your filter might look like this
"base_data"."owner_email" = ${system.login.email}if the table on which you built your reports and dashboard is base_data and you had a column for the record owner (be it Accounts, Deals, etc.) called owner_email.
4. The permalink that is generated you can then share via email to your team or throw it into a CRM or Books webtab. Try it yourself!
The URL Filter then works by matching the login email of the User accessing the report and matching that to the email values in the column in the base_data. It only returns data for the user viewing the report. Thus, everyone sees a personalized dashboard without having to create one for every single person.
