would it be possible to add a new type of text filter which would use regular expressions?
Sample use case is from our content team. They want to check performance of certain types of articles in a series – new article coming every week. Current “is” filter with a possibility of making a list of values is not enough as new content is coming regularly and hence there is a risk of forgetting to update this filter.
Regex filter would make sure that the selection is always up-to-date with new articles following certain pattern.
As a possible alternative solution, depending if you are using any data pipeline tool like dbt or dataform you could implement this in the code to create a category fields, which you could then use to filter by. You could have the regex’s defined in a Google Sheet or something similar which people could edit and update, and this could be used by the data pipeline to dynamically create the categories.
Huge thanks for the suggestion, @JanKadlec
I totally agree that having Regex matching in text filter would be very handy in a lot of cases. I’ll raise this with the team for discussion.
In the meantime, could you give us a real-life example of how you’d like to filter your text data?
It’s for understanding your case better, and also for coming up with any possible workaround. One like @DataGeekDude has suggested about setting this up in data pipeline tool. (Btw, this is awesome. Thank you, Craig )
@DataGeekDude Thank you. This is a workaround I was thinking about as well. However, it would require setting this up every time we encounter such a scenario so the marketing team would have to create a request, allocate resources and wait quite a long time because there are usually more important requests for our BI team.
@vu.duong Another example is collecting leads during conferences. There are usually more ways to collect leads and the sales team keeps a record of this (e.g. like “websummit-demo” or “websummit-giveaway”). It would be possible to just keep record of these tags and fill them into “is” filter but this approach is prone to human error (somebody could omit some variant) + it looks for a full match. “contains” filter is insufficient in cases when we would like to analyze more events – while it allows a partial match, AFAIK it’s possible to enter just one value.
Basically I’m looking for something like “contains” filter with OR logic and multiple keywords (and as we are a tech company, simple regex with pipes would be the easiest way).
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