Allow JSM customers to filter requests by project in help center

[Harrison Ponce]

Wow! I just went down a crazy rabbit hole trying to find a way to get our JSM customers who interact with multiple portals / projects, to be able to filter their requests more nicely.

Currently you can only filter on status, participation, and request types. Each project has several request types, and the drop-down menu has a limit on the amount of items it displays, despite the customer having access to more projects and their request types. Customers have to know what they're looking for, search, and then check all the boxes for the request types of that service project. They also are unable to save their filters there so they have to repeat these steps every time they want to look at only orders from a specific portal.

I was hoping to solve this quickly with Forge, while Atlassian determines if this is something they will work on (JSDCLOUD-16200) - duplicate of JSDCLOUD-10805 which was marked as Won't Do)
However, Forge doesn't seem to have any way to modify the request view for customers in the JSM help center.

This just makes it really difficult to get buy-in on centralizing services and experiences, and instead promotes the desire for entirely separate JSM sites and/or tools (beyond Atlassian), which then makes customers have to go to multiple places to get what they need.

Open to any suggestions, if anyone has any.

[Tim Pettersen]

Hi again @Harrison Ponce

While I can't comment specifically on the priority of those JSM feature requests, I might be able to suggest a creative solution using Forge. 

There's a few elements to this solution that I'll cover before getting into the detail:

- While you can't directly modify filtering behaviour on the portal request list view, you can add a Portal Header module that is displayed at the top. 

- Forge apps can read the current page URL from the context object returned by view.getContext() (the `context.extension.location` property specifically)

- Forge apps can redirect the user's browser to an arbitrary URL using router.navigate()

Note also that the portal request list view automatically updates the URL with the user's currently selected filters.

Using these components, you could build a custom Forge panel that provides additional filtering options (or even the ability to save and recall individual queries) by reading the URL, and automatically navigating the user's browser to the desired filter settings. The downside is that this would reload the browser when one of your custom filtering options is selected, but that may be worth the trade-off.

I agree this would be a nice feature to have baked into the product, but from your other posts you sound pretty handy with Forge, so I thought I'd offer you a potential solution while there isn't one available in the core product.  

Hope this helps!

Tim