[FEATURE_REQUEST] Advanced Widget Filtering and Sorting System

[athul-22]

Is your feature request related to a problem? If so, please describe.

Currently, Dashy's widgets are powerful but lack advanced filtering and sorting capabilities. Users managing large homelab environments or multiple service categories often struggle to efficiently organize and display relevant widget information based on dynamic criteria. This becomes particularly challenging when users have 50+ services or need to switch between different views (production, development, monitoring-focused, etc.).

Describe the solution you'd like

Implement advanced filtering and sorting functionality for widgets with the following capabilities:

Enhanced Widget Filtering:

• Tag-based filtering: Allow users to assign custom tags to widgets and filter by multiple tags
• Service status filtering: Filter widgets by operational status (up/down/warning)
• Category-based filtering: Organize widgets into user-defined categories with toggle visibility
• Search functionality: Real-time search across widget titles, descriptions, and content

Sorting Options:

• Custom sort orders: Allow users to define custom sorting criteria (alphabetical, by status, by last update, by priority)
• Drag-and-drop reordering: Visual reordering of widgets with persistent positioning
• Auto-sorting based on status: Automatically prioritize widgets showing critical alerts or down services

Filter Persistence:

• Session persistence: Remember filter states across browser sessions
• User profiles: Different filter presets for different user roles or use cases
• Export/Import filters: Share filter configurations between Dashy instances

Implementation Approach:

1. Extend the existing widget system with metadata support for tags and categories
2. Implement filter UI components in the dashboard interface
3. Add filter state management to local storage and user preferences
4. Create filter persistence mechanism compatible with existing backup/restore functionality
5. Update widget documentation with filtering examples

This would benefit homelab administrators managing extensive setups, enable team dashboards with role-specific views, improve monitoring during incidents, and support project-based service organization.

Priority

Medium (Would be very useful)

Is this something you would be keen to implement

Maybe

[shumittaher]

Hello, I have been working on the filtering part of this a little.

This is how my implementation works:
firstly, we need to add "category" to out conf.yaml when we define our sections. as such:

the category field is optional. not having it just means those widgets will not be considered for filtering

then once, we have categories defined for each (what text to use as a category is totally up to the user) widget, the widgets can be global searched from the search box as such:

the search will show only widgets of that category.

also, we can in the edit menu: define the sections' widget categories that we want to show. as such:

this will filter and show only those widgets in that section.

please let me know if this looks like a good implementation or if you have other suggestions.

thanks.

[liss-bot]

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