Using Dynamic Filters

Dynamic filters can help you display only the content from a collection that's relevant to a dynamic page item without creating separate data collections for each page of a website.

This feature can be used in a variety of ways. You can categorize Properties by area on a real estate site, sort students by grade on a school website, or show different workout classes on a Fitness Studio website. Let's take a closer look at that example.

Say you're a personal trainer that offers exercise classes. You have a database that contains a lot of different information like class names, class times, instructors, and current availability.

If you wanted to have a page just for your pilates class offerings, instead of creating and maintaining a new collection just for pilates class information, you can now apply a dynamic filter to a connected widget on a dynamic page that only displays pilates class info on the Pilates Page, yoga info on the yoga page and so forth, all based on the same collection of data.

This saves you time when building your website and decreases the time it takes to update your class information later on. Dynamic filters aren't just for table widgets.

The feature is available in every widget that can be connected to collections. When added to a dynamic page, this includes Gallery widgets, list widgets, accordion widgets, slider widgets, and custom widgets. The dynamic filter can be found in the sort and filter tab in the connected data pop-up.

To use Dynamic filters, you'll only need to create two collections: one that contains your data in a category name field called class listings in this example, and another that contains all categories themselves and their details named types of workout classes here.

From here, you'll create Dynamic Pages for each row in the types of workout classes collection.

Then you can add a widget that can be connected to data, such as the table widget, to any page of your choice.

Click on the gear icon and then select connect to data. Now you've connected to the class listening selection and, if you want, choose which fields you want to display.

Then click the filter and sort tab. Here's where you can apply Dynamic filters in the dynamic filter section. Click add filter. This maps between the class title field in the class listings data collection and the workout class name field in the types of workout classes collection.

When a user views the Pilates page item, the filter value will change to Pilates, so only Pilates classes will be displayed on the Pilates page. Because these are Dynamic Pages, we only have to set these filters once for them to apply across all Dynamic pages. So the yoga page only shows yoga information, and the same goes for the Core Fitness page too.

Another useful feature is fixed filters. This filters by the same value in all Dynamic page items, meaning the filter doesn't change according to the page. For example, I can set a fixed filter to only show classes that are marked as available on all workout class pages.

Check out the support article on Dynamic and fixed filters for more information on these features.

Hi everyone, I'm Dorit from Duda Support Team, and I want to introduce you to a useful feature we have that can be a bit confusing: Dynamic Filters. Dynamic Filters—when do you use them? If you want to filter Dynamic Pages, meaning you want to filter one collection according to a category and display these categories in separate pages. Basically, you can move between one Dynamic Page to another Dynamic Page.

In this example, I took our Clinic template, and I want to filter doctors according to their departments. I already have this widget connected to the collection. So I can go to one Dynamic Page—Pediatrics—and I can take a look at my staff. This is already filtered, so this is the staff for this department. And if I want to go to Senior Care, then I’ll have different staff.

Here in my staff, I’ll have all my doctors. Each one of them has its corresponding department. So this is a pretty simple example. It basically allows me to have doctors and department services—each department has its doctors filtered according to the category. So this is what's useful here.

Now let’s see how I built this. To start, you need to have two collections. I need to have one collection that contains most of the information I want. This collection has categories, and the categories will be the second collection.

Your main collection does not have to be an internal collection—I used it because it's easier for me to use data like images we already have—but this can also be a Google Sheet, Airtable collection, or an external collection. But your second collection—the categories themselves—does need to be an internal collection. You cannot connect one external collection to another external collection. I hope this is clear. This is not crucial for the example.

Let’s take a look at the fields in the doctors collection. Nothing too special here. The only thing is I have doctor's name, their title, their image, and a short bio. What you can see is that I have one field that is the same—the departments—because these are my categories. So one field, the text field, is something that I want to display on the website. I treat this just like any other text field.

But this field is an options field, and this is where Dynamic Filters come into play. I have two options: Pediatrics and Senior Care. I can have more options. What’s important to understand is that this multi-select field is something that we don’t display. So I could have called this instead of Pediatrics and Senior Care—One and Two. It would be exactly the same. It is important to understand that this is just for sorting and filtering.

So let me call it again what it used to be—Pediatrics and Senior Care. What’s important to understand is that I don’t treat this as a text field. This is just to sort, to filter. This can be One and Two instead of Pediatrics and Senior Care. It’s basically internal use, and I need to have this field correspond with my second collection.

If I go to my departments collection, I can see that I have a corresponding field. As you can see, this is not an options field, but it can be—it’s not important. What is important is that I have a field that corresponds to the other field because I want to filter the other collection according to this one.

So I have two collections, and I will have two Dynamic Pages. I don’t have to display both of them, but I chose to display them here. I don’t have to do it. Here, let’s go to my Doctors page. This is a Dynamic Page—everything here is connected to the collection. And this widget is connected to my second collection.

I’m in the doctors’ Dynamic Page where everything is connected to doctors. If I look at my data here, it's connected to doctors. But this widget is connected to departments. Here, I want to filter this, so I go to Filter and Sort, and I sort this according to the department collection, department name, and I match this field to my options field, my multi-select field in the other collection. Now it automatically filters this according to its department, which is Pediatrics.

You can see that each doctor will have its own department, and the same goes for the departments. If I want to go from this Dynamic Page to another Dynamic Page, I can click and it will put me into another Dynamic Page. This is something that wasn’t available before—now I can move between two Dynamic Pages.

Now I’m in the Pediatrics department, and I want to look at my staff. Again, I can go into one of these Dynamic Pages. Again, on the department page I have a widget that is filtered according to the other collection. If I look here at my connected data, this field is connected to doctors. Remember that I’m in my departments page, so this is not the doctors’ page, but I connected this to my other collection.

When I go to Filter and Sort, it's exactly the same—I match two fields that are the categories fields. These are options basically. Never mind—let’s continue.

So this is basically it. I hope I was able to clarify this a bit more. The important things to remember:

Plan ahead—what you want to display, what your categories are.

Understand the concept of options fields—the multi-select field is something you only sort according to; the content is not important. What is important is that you match this field to a corresponding field in the other collection. The fields must match because they filter based on these values.

Dynamic Filters enable you to move between Dynamic Pages.

If you’re using a text field here to match the options to the second collection, use a simple plain text field, not rich text.

You can also change this into an options field. For example, I’ll call it “Options” and add the exact same options. This is the multi-select. Now I’ll use this options field instead of departments name. It will be exactly the same.

This is Dynamic Filters. I hope I was able to clarify this.