Basic Text Mode Filters for Beginners

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Did You Know? Basic Text Mode Filters for Beginners

At Workfront, we are passionate about creating real solutions that provide you with a better, more productive work experience. The next several blogs will focus on a topic you asked for — basic text mode for beginners.

Why Text Mode: Text mode unleashes the full power of Workfront reporting capabilities; unlocking your data in ways that make more business sense to your organization - for example, by combining columns, or accessing a wider variety of fields, including your custom fields.  

This week we’re sharing some introductory notes, along with a few examples of text mode for filters.

Text mode is the programming language used to create reports in Workfront. Although you may not realize it, each time you add a filter to a report, text mode is applied in the background.

The clean user-friendly interface of the Report Builder was designed for people like you and I, who don’t have programming experience but still want to build custom reports. However, there are limitations to what can be done in the Report Builder. So if you need to go beyond what the Report Builder offers, a “back door” is available that can take you to the text mode interface. It’s the “Switch to Text Mode” option in the upper right corner of the screen, where available. When you click on it, you will see the text mode code for whatever you have already created using the Report Builder interface. Since text mode code is more difficult to work with and requires exact spelling and capitalization, let the Report Builder give you as much of it as possible.

Pro Tip: Workfront’s reporting experts recommend you start by creating as much of your filter in the Report Builder as you can before switching to text mode. 

Example #1: You want to view all tasks that contain several keywords in the description: marketing, technology, and 2019. 

Start by creating a new filter on a Task report and choose Task > Description > Contains > marketing.

Switch to text mode in the top-right corner. Copy both lines of filter text and paste it directly underneath. In front of the copied text, insert AND:1: on both lines. Copy the original filter text again and paste it at the bottom, for a total of six lines. In front of this newly pasted filter text, insert AND:2: on both lines.

Notice that you now have three places with the text “description=marketing”. On the first AND:1: line change “description=marketing” to “description=technology”. On the first AND:2: line change “description=marketing” to “description=2019”. 

Your text mode should look like this:

description=marketing

description_Mod=cicontains

AND:1:description=technology

AND:1:description_Mod=cicontains

AND:2:description=2019

AND:2:description_Mod=cicontains

This tells Workfront to filter for projects whose descriptions (case insensitive) contain the word marketing AND (case insensitive) the word technology AND (case insensitive) the word 2019. 

Once you click Save + Close, only tasks with all three words in the description appear in the results list. 

Example #2: You want a list of all projects whose status is Complete—Pending Approval. 

Start by creating a new filter on a Project report and choose Project > Status > Equals > Complete. 

Switch to text mode in the top-right corner. Following CPL (which is the key associated with this status), add :A for pending approval.

The text mode now looks like this:

status=CPL:A

status_Mod=eq

If you have an approval process tied to a different status (other than Complete), you can follow this same process of adding :A to the status key in text mode. 

As a reminder, do as much as you can in the Report Builder prior to switching to text mode so you don’t have to manually type out each statement.

If you found this post helpful, make sure to “Like” it below. For any specific requests using text mode in filters, please share the details below and we will respond back.