Make collection filters discoverable

[jared-thoughtbot]

Current state

You can add collection filters to a dashboard and then search using them using the search bar on the index page.

Problem

These collection filters are not discoverable. You have to know about them already to know how to use them.

Potential solution

Add a tooltip next to the search box when collection filters are provided. Probably with an option to disable the tooltip in case some people do not want it.

We could dynamically populate the content based on the collection filters. Eg.

I appreciate we might not want to introduce tooltip code and assets just for this one thing. I don't know if there are other issues / future features on the roadmap that could also benefit from tooltips?

Alternatives

• Using the input placeholder or somehow inlining the filter options - but these don't scale very well if you have a few filters
• Linking to a new page which lists the filter options
• Something else?

[kevinkimball]

Big +1 to this feature request. This is one of the biggest things I feel is missing, and not straightforward to implement yourself.

Additional features that would make this even better:

1. Filter bar with buttons/ dropdowns. Implementation-wise this could be something similar to Field?
2. Option to provide dropdown options for filters similar to Field::Select.with_options(collection: [...])
3. Option to provide query for autocomplete for filters

[nickcharlton]

I think this is an excellent idea.

As I started reading, I was thinking about the placeholder being a good solution, but when you've got several it's not so nice. But I wonder if we can randomly show a different filter in there, or something!

Tooltips are a bit easier to achieve now, so I think writing our own here would be the right approach to take. We could then use this to provide tooltips in other areas of the project where it makes sense.

A good place to start, if someone wanted to pick this up, would be to see if we've got the right sort of data accessible in the view to populate a tooltip, and then start exploring a tooltip implementation we could ship as part of Administrate (it shouldn't involve any dependencies, use modern standards and as little JS as we can get away with.)

@kevinkimball, thanks! Those are good ideas too. Could you create different issues to track those? Especially so if you could do a mockup like @jared-thoughtbot did.