allow creating folders under charts/dashboards

[Max-beep]

We have a large number of charts/dashboards within our Superset environment and it's been hard for us to look for specific charts sometimes.

It will be nice for us to have a better way to organize the charts such as being able to put them into folders so they aren't just in one long list.

[geido]

Hello @Max-beep this is indeed a nice suggestion. Folders would be one way to categorize these objects. Another option could be by assigning labels and the ability to filter the list out.

I know for a fact that some people are using a workaround for categorizing these objects by prefixing the title with some specific string, such as [LABEL] {Title}. That might help you in the short term :)

[geido]

For reference, I read a thread from @opus-42 on Slack about a similar functionality they developed outside of Superset. It would be nice to discuss if and how should we bring that in Superset, as it looks like a few people have this requirement.

[rumbin]

Also opting for labels/tags. Folders are too much limiting in my eyes as they require to pick exactly one single category or, if nested folders are allowed, one single hierarchy of categories.

[kingo55]

+1 for tags here too.

Also related - I think that featuring search more prominently (e.g. bigger, left aligned in the filters list and default focus on page load) with real-time results on key-up could also make dashboards faster to find. I often start searching and expect the list to filter. This may be a separate issue though.

[opus-42]

For reference, I read a thread from @opus-42 on Slack about a similar functionality they developed outside of Superset. It would be nice to discuss if and how should we bring that in Superset, as it looks like a few people have this requirement.

Hello @geido. I join what has been said, we have a lot of dashboard and a lot of various people using them. Even if some see only a subset, we need to classify them.

I have actually recently start re-working our folder view of our Apache-Superset private fork to see how it can integrate in the 1.0+ UI. The basic idea would be to introduce a new concept call "Project" (I think it called like that in other tools) that allow to gather charts and dashboards. Then there are several points / possibility to discuss:

• Allow to display within the Dashboard view a folder view (some dashboard may not be attached to a folder)
• Build Project view that would indifferently gather boards and graphs from a same projet (more complex to develop I assume)
• Actually project could progressively gather a whole collections of objects that intend to be part of a same entity. For companies that may be a team, or a specific scope.

[andrey-mikhailov]

It will be nice to support multi-tenancy in Superset, implement something similar like namespaces in Kibana.
Every tenant will have own namespace, only dashboards/charts from the current namespace will be visible.

[stephanclaus]

Hi, this is a recurring discussion over the last years - you can find more open issues around the topic here with a lot of pros and cons argumentation

#9551
#3821

(Interestingly, there are already tables in the metadata database tag and tagged_object)

I think everyone agrees that this functionality would be extremely helpful and kind of mandatory step to allow superset to be an alternative for larger organisations as well.

My main question is now (I am very new to OS community processes):

What is the usual process to make that a piece to work on with priority, like including it in a SIP?

[AlenaSkurat]

I also vote for the feature to have folders and support multi-tenancy, it's extremely useful for companies with several departments who would like to use the same tool.

[svdimchenko]

Great suggestion, many other BI tools (redash, metabase) support it and it's extremely useful. It would be great to add such feature support to superset as well.

[timnick-snow]

looking forward to this feature

[vnaidu-wish]

+1

[ImadYamane]

+1

[fazilhero]

+1

[Schnurres]

Would be a really nice feature.

[JubayerJoy]

+1

[heyromnivan]

+1

TL/DR tags are good, but folders would still be way better

Tags aren't able to cover this problem fully, as tags don't help discovering charts/dashboard and observing the full picture. With tags you need to know beforehand which tag is grouping the charts/dashboards you're interested in, and although you can often guess - this is not a sustainable approach. Tags also can't stop people from simply not using them (while with folders you can make the root or any other folder read-only for most users).
In contrast, with folders you can easily discover charts related to a specific team/data area, as you would naturally see what options are there on each level of hierarchy.

I think a good metaphor for this is picturing a physical warehouse. Right now we only have the floor to store items on, no shelves or tables. We can create some rules ourselves that these items go in this pile, and others in those piles, but that's about it in terms or organizing storage. With tags we've been given a can of paint and a brush - now we can label the floor to indicate what each pile means. But it's still just the floor.
In this picture adding folders would be like finally adding proper shelves into our warehouse - which also, by design, will have to be labeled. IMO it's pretty clear that this would be infinitely better in terms or organizing our storage.

[sfirke]

Superset is getting a tagging system. It's currently behind the feature flag TAGGING_SYSTEM. As of 4.0.0 it is still "in development" so subject to change and you have to manually enable it in your environment. But I hope it will stabilize and become the default soon! I look forward to analyzing Superset usage by tag.

Re: folders specifically: managing information with tags vs. folders is a matter of opinion. If you search the web for "tags vs folders" you'll find lots of arguments either way. Given that tagging was first contributed in 2022 and has been improving behind the scenes for a while, that's the direction Superset is headed in. I see some people would prefer folders. At this point that seems unlikely to get developer attention given that tagging is already addressing the problem of how to categorize dashboards.

[Jwalking]

Is there still talk of supporting permission-based folders down the road? The use case and need is for larger organizations with many users, dashboards and datasets, and especially where the data is sensitive. Thank you