How to Filter Applications

When managing the applications of a program within your site you will be interested in following their progress, ensuring that they are completed correctly, locating patterns in incomplete applications, and more. This article explains how to apply filters to your Manage Applications page to view the applications that are important to you and the actions you are looking to complete.

Throughout this article, we will be referring to various icons and menus that are used to create, manage and apply filters to your applications. Below is a summary of these features as well as a brief description of what they do.

Your status filter menu allows you to toggle between active and inactive applications. This filter applies in conjunction with any custom filters applied to the program's applications. Active applications will be shown by default when Manage Applications is accessed.

To toggle between active and inactive applications:

Toggling between active and inactive filters will clear any existing custom filters applied to your applications. Be sure to save your custom filters before toggling this menu if you will be using the custom filter often going forward, but do not want to rebuild it.

Custom filters are used to filter results in a variety of areas throughout an SM Apply site. When applying a filter to the Manage Applications page the custom filter will display results that satisfy all applied conditions within the filter. A single filter can consist of multiple conditions to target specific applications.

There are three menus use to create a custom filter. The chart below provides a description of the terminology used to describe the custom filter builder within Manage Applications and references an example of a custom filter which would pull all applications that have not yet been declared awarded or rejected applications.

When viewing applications from Manage Applications page you may wish to apply a custom filter to your list of applications.

To add a custom filter:

The example above demonstrates how to apply a custom filter to retrieve applications that have been submitted.

Once the filter has been applied, a banner will appear titled with a short summary of the filter below the Condition menu.

When a filter has been applied it will appear as a summarized banner directly below the custom filter builder. Removing a filter can be done by selecting the X within the banner of the filter(s) you would like to remove from the page.

In some cases, more than one filter will be needed in order to retrieve the desired applications in your results list.

To add multiple filters:

The following group of filters is selected in the condition portion of your custom filter. The value of the filter will vary depending on the filter selected. Many of these filters are site-specific including stage names, label titles, and application IDs.

Custom fields that target applications will be presented within the Application details category to assist in filtering applications. If a custom field is not appearing the Applicant Information category then it is not currently targeting the applicant role.

For more information regarding Custom Fields, please see our documentation on How to Create a Custom Field.

Custom fields that target the applicant role will be presented within the Applicant Information category to assist in filtering applications. If a custom field is not appearing the Applicant Information category then it is not currently targeting the applicant role.

For more information regarding Custom Fields, please see our documentation on How to Create a Custom Field.

The filters below are found in the Application Stage condition category when creating a new filter in the Manage Applications page.

These filters have additional choices required to complete a custom filter which are described later in this section.

Multiple selections are required when applying a stage completion filter. As stated earlier, only application stages can be selected to complete this filter and verify whether an applicant has progressed to a certain stage in the program workflow.

To apply a stage completion filter:

The example above will filter for applications that submitted applications in the Application Stage. This will not include applications that are currently in that stage unless they have submitted the application while within that stage.

The variable filters section will allow you to filter applications based on their responses to forms within your site.

These filters can refer to the completion status of an application task in any application stage in the workflow. Because the filters applied here are to filter the applications that appear in your results, only tasks that are completed by the applicant can be used for this filer.

The filter applied above is used to filter for applications that have not completed the application task titled "Upload Task." The filter will check the current status of the task, meaning that if the applicant completed the "Upload Task" previously and then deleted the file, the application would be included in this filter because the current status would be considered "Not Started."

The options available in this section will be dependent on the form types and questions in your site. For most of the question types you will be given the criteria to select whether or not the question/variable has a response or has no response. This can be helpful when trying to determine a user's progress in the form, or perhaps if the question type is optional and you want to see who responded to it.

To apply a form response filter:

The value/target to select when developing a form response filter will vary depending on the question type used in the form the question is presented. Below is an explanation of what will be presented in the value/target menu when a particular question type is selected.

There are also two question types which are not available to be filtered based on the format of the question. Those questions types are:

The filters below are found in the Review Stages condition category when creating a new filter in the Manage Applications page.

The options available in this section will be dependent on the review stage types and questions in your site. In an Advanced Review Form most of the question types you will be given the criteria to select whether or not the question/variable has a response or has no response. This can be helpful when trying to determine a user's progress in the form, or perhaps if the question type is optional and you want to see who responded to it.

To apply a form response filter:

If you are looking to filter by one of your simply review stages. The responses available will depend on the setup of the simple review stage.

The value/target to select when developing a form response filter will vary depending on the question type used in the advanced review form the question is presented. Below is an explanation of what will be presented in the value/target menu when a particular question type is selected.

There are also two question types which are not available to be filtered based on the format of the question. Those questions types are:

The matching parameter (2) is used to specify under which circumstances applications will appear. It states the acceptable relationship between the value/target (3) and the selected condition (1). Available matching parameters are dependent on the condition selected.

The numbering above describes the location of the feature as shown in the example below.