Improved Cases Menu – Whipping the Filters Menu into Shape

FogBugz, she is a changin’. In the last couple of months alone we’ve updated the case page, added postponed cases as well as in-app notifications, personal activity feeds and periodic email notifications. Well now we’ve given the Cases menu (née Filters menu) a functionality face-lift too.

Cases Menu – What Has Changed?

FogBugz has always been hungry for your data. And to help manage that glorious, gluttonous, gob of cases, FogBugz provides a Swiss Army knife for slicing and dicing your cases known colloquially as “the list page.”

Whenever you click on the “Cases” button in the header (or select a saved filter from its associated menu) you’re taken to a list of cases. You can filter cases (e.g., “status:active”), perform full text searches (e.g., “Frog Reef”), and even combine both filters and searches (e.g., “status:active Frog Reef”). Once you’ve crafted the perfect partition of cases, ordered them just so, and selected the columns showing just what you’re most interested in, you can save the whole concoction as a Saved Filter.

Saved filters on the cases menu are sorted alphabetically, so some FogBugz users have resorted to using fun names like “__Stuff” and “__Important Casez!” to group related filters together. Blech. To help remedy this misfortune, we’ve added filter groups to the cases menu (more details below) to let you group your personal filters whichever way you see fit.

Sharing is caring…except when people overshare

Now you might be thinking, “Awesome! But how can I brag about share the usefulness of my carefully crafted filters?” Good question, hypothetical you! That’s where “Shared Filters” come in. Anyone can share their personal saved filters, and when they do, everyone else that uses FogBugz will also see that filter in their cases menu. Handy? You bet. Can it get out of control? Certainly. Especially as your company grows and more folks on different teams start sharing their filters all over the place. What’s a FogBugz user to do? Well, up until now, not a whole lot other than watch the “Shared Filters” section of your cases menu grow like a well-intentioned weed:

“What’s wrong with that?” an inquisitive hypothetical you asks. Everything! You shouldn’t be subjected to an ever-growing list of shared filters that you mostly don’t give a hoot about. Just like you shouldn’t need to wander off to a completely separate page within FogBugz just to share your genius grouping of FogBugz goodies.

“So, uh…how are you gonna fix it then?” I’m glad you asked!

The Improved Cases Menu

We’ve recently updated the cases menu with a metric filter-ton of improvements. From the newly-added filter groups, to better shared filter management. We’ve tried to give you the organizational tools you need to get your filters menu whipped into shape, so that you can get back to actually working on the cases in those filters instead.

Filter groups

No more need for weird prefixes to help keep your personal saved filters organized! You can now create as many personal filter groups as you like and freely drag your filters between them:

Drag-and-drop re-ordering

You can also drag-and-drop the groups themselves to determine the order in which they’re displayed, while the filters within each group are automatically sorted alphabetically.

Collapsible menus

Still have too many saved filters to look at all at once? Well, filter groups (including the built-in “My Filters” and “Shared Filters” groups) are now collapsible and will remember their collapsed-ness no matter what browser or computer you might be using. Collapsed filter groups tell you the number of filters they contain (even whilst they’re being dragged!):

Delete saved filters from the Cases menu

You can now delete your own saved filters (including those you’ve shared) without ever leaving the cases menu by hovering over them and clicking the new delete icon:

Easier shared filter management

Got too many shared filters in your cases menu that you’re not actually interested in? Now you can hide other people’s shared filters from your cases menu by hovering over them and clicking the new hide icon:

Don’t worry though, you can still get them back (in case you change your mind) via the “Manage filters…” page.

Better sharing of saved filters

Sharing your own saved filters has also gotten easier. Now it is as easy as clicking and dragging your soon-to-be-shared filter into the “Shared Filters” section of the cases menu:

Un-sharing (or making your own personal copy of someone else’s shared filter) is just as easy by dragging a filter out of the “Shared Filters” group.

Is there anything the new cases menu can’t do? Sadly, I’m afraid there is. It can’t help you with last minute gift shopping…or with that income tax mishap from 2014. But it can help keep the cases and filters you hold most dear within easy reach. We hope it improves your ability to get the most out of all of those juicy cases FogBugz has been keeping an eye on for you. Go forth and filter!