Filtering on missing / null values is awful - improve it!

RobertPenridge

TLDR:

If a column contains a null value, there is no way built into the UI to filter to select null values only. Additionally, if you happen to choose "NOT IN" as your filter type and select a value, NULL values will additionally be excluded even if not requested.

I understand that there is a workaround using beastmodes, but this shouldn't be required. Additionally, the "NOT IN" scenario that excludes NULLS is actively giving people incorrect results.

/TLDR

DOMO has approached the topic of how to filter missing values with a developer centric mindset instead of a business user mindset, and this needs to change. The users expected behaviour when they go to apply a filter and select an "empty" box to see all the missing values… is to see the missing values. Likewise, if the consumer selects 'NOT IN' and chooses a single value, they don't expect anything they didn't select to also be filtered out.I understand that when doing comparisons to NULL values in the database layer this is the 'correct' answer, but that isn't helping your customers get the answers they need. It's just causing frustration, errors, and wasting people's time. Not only this but it erodes people's confidence in your reporting platform - our accounting team doesn't understand why filtering on a value using "IN" and then filtering on the same value using "NOT IN" doesn't line up to the unfiltered total, and I don't blame them.

This is probably my most frequently run into frustration with DOMO, and I know that it bugs many other users that I speak with as well.

To my knowledge, the only current workaround is to write a beastmode to make the desired comparison and then use that as a filter - but that's a horrible experience for the average non-technical user, and a very poor experience for the average technical user.

I can only imagine how many people are currently making decisions based on incomplete results due to this mishandling of the current filters.

Please, please, fix this.