A filter is a collection of attribute values that, when applied to your Asset Bank, restrict what assets a user can see. When you create filters they are shown to your users as options in a drop down box, located in the header. This allows users a user to control which filter is currently applied or to switch filtering off by selecting 'no filtering'.

Filters are created and managed in the Filters tab of the Attributes section of the Admin menu.

When you create a filter you need to define the set of attribute values that you want the filter to apply and give it a descriptive name that will enable users to determine what the filter does when they are selecting a filter to apply.

For example, let's say you are a company that has multiple brands to your name and you have a 'brand' attribute that specifies which brand an asset applies to (this would probably be a drop down box or a check box list).

You may want to set up a filter for each of your brands so that users can know that they are only looking at assets for the brand they are interested in. To do this you would need to create one filter for each brand.

In each filter the only attribute you would specify a value for would be the brand attribute, where you would choose the correct brand for the current filter.

Category/Folder Linked Filters

There are two types of filters in Asset Bank:

• Global Filters - which are what we have been talking about so far. These are applied globally to quick searches, browsing assets, promoted assets, featured assets, recent assets and the Advanced Search form. Once created they will show up in the filter control underneath the left-hand navigation.
• Category/Folder Linked Filters - these are essentially the same as global filters except that they are applied to specific categories or folder.

When you add or edit a filter you will see the links 'Show in category' and 'Show in folder'. Clicking either of these reveals a checkbox list of the categories or folders in the system:

If you select any of these categories then a link will be added to the browse page of that category allowing users to quickly apply the filter while they are browsing:

The main reason for this particular functionality is to eliminate the need for duplicate subcategory structures. Let's say for example that you have set a top level category in your Asset Bank for each of your company's office locations. Now let's say that for each office location you want to subcategorise by department (e.g. Human Resources, IT, Sales, Customer Support).

One way of achieving this would be to create a subcategory for each department and duplicate this structure across all your office locations. But this would be time consuming to set up and difficult to maintain. Alternatively, assuming you had a 'department' attribute for your assets, then you could set up a filter for each of your departments. You could then show this filter in all of your office location categories. This would mean that when your users browse an office location they can still drill down to departments within that location without you having had to set up the same subcategories in every location.

Filter Groups

If you are creating lots of global filters then you may want to group filters together into separate dropdowns in the filter control. This is where Filter Groups come in.  For example, the following figure shows a filter control panel where the filters have been organised into 2 groups: 'Brands' and 'Department'.

To create a new filter group click the 'Manage filter groups' link on the main Filters page:

This takes you to the Filter Groups page where you can edit or delete any existing filter groups and add new ones. The only property of a filter group you need to specify is its name. Once you have set up some filter groups you will be able to specify which filter group a filter should belong to (if any) whenever you edit or add a new filter.