Build your first dashboard

1 min read

Here’s the payoff: a dashboard where your viewers filter the data themselves, and every panel on the page moves together. Two gadgets and about five minutes.

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You’ll need edit rights on a Jira dashboard and an advanced filter to point at. Don’t have one? Start with Create your first advanced filter.

Step 1: Add a Results gadget #

Open a Jira dashboard, select Edit, then Add gadget.
Search for Advanced Filter Results and add it.
Select Configure. The form opens right inside the gadget (no separate dialog).
Advanced filter: choose yours. (In the screenshots below it’s Bluefin Pay.)
View: leave it on The first available view.
Select Save.

You’ll see work items immediately. If your filter has no views set up yet, the gadget falls back to Key, Summary, Status and Assignee. There’s nothing to configure before you can see data.

The Results gadget's configuration form open inside the gadget, with the advanced filter chosen. — Configuring a Results gadget: choose the advanced filter, then the view it opens on.

Step 2: Add a Controller on the same filter #

Select Add gadget again and search for Advanced Filter Controller.
Set Advanced filter to the same advanced filter you used for the Results gadget.
Select Save.

The Controller's configuration form with the same advanced filter chosen as the Results gadget. — The Controller points at the same advanced filter as the Results gadget, and that’s the whole trick.

The one idea worth knowing #

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Gadgets that share an advanced filter on the same dashboard move as one. They share the data, the filtering and the refresh. There’s nothing to wire up: pointing them at the same filter is the connection.

The Controller is the toolbar for that group. It shows a pill for each quick filter, a selector for each field control and smart rule, and a JQL box if you enabled Enable JQL filtering. Quick filter pills apply the moment you select them; everything else waits for Apply.

Either way, it doesn’t just change the Controller. Every gadget on that dashboard using the same advanced filter updates at the same time. Type a value a control can’t read, and Apply stays disabled, saying which control to correct. See Advanced Filter Controller.

A quick-filter pill selected on the Controller, with the Results table under it showing the narrowed set. — One click on the Controller narrows the table below and every other gadget on the same filter.

Step 3: Keep adding #

Drop in a Statistics gadget, or a row of Simple Counters, and point them at the same advanced filter. The Controller drives them too, with no extra configuration. This is how one dashboard ends up serving five teams instead of five dashboards serving one each.

Gadgets on a different advanced filter form their own independent group, and ordinary Jira gadgets aren’t affected at all, so you can mix freely on one page.