Daisy Chain Filtering and Search Constraints Best Practices

[artemzheg]

@boston85719

Anytime you use the :filtered operator, all the filter constraints within that are done client side, not server side

@boston85719

As far as my understanding is based on what I’ve been taught by Bubble is that using the :filtered operator, regardless of the type of filter, is happening client side, not server side.

@georgecollier

Only advanced filters or when used on option sets. Bubble treats :filtered like a search whenever possible. I thought this a while ago too but I was corrected

I’ve used to take on faith that as soon as you apply :filter operator - everything is filtered client-side. And this was the reason:

An underlying principle is that if a filter (or sort) can be done “on the database”, it will be faster than a filter (or sort) that Bubble has to do after retrieving an initial set of data from the database. Which filters are done on the database vs. not? Filters which show up in the Search palette (the additional sidebar which slides out when you click “Do a search for”) are done on the database and are thus are generally fast. Filters which are applied with :filter are generally “advanced” filters that are generally slower.
[bubble manual]

But while playing with WU consumption in one of my apps I’ve noticed zero difference between using basic [=fields of the data type] constraints in Do a search expression and in :filtered operator. I’ve dived into Chrome DevTools and discovered that :filtered operator returns filtered items from the DB (again, if I was using basic constraints).

Not wanna copy the whole thread here, so you can check some info I got from Bubble support about client/server filtering here:

Search & Filter Performance

Hi Bubblers, Looking into ways to optimise our app and our uses of search and filtering. I understand search happens on the serverside while filtering is done locally. In a scenario where we have a large list of Things that need to be filtered based on the tab a user is currently on, is it better to apply a different search with a constraint for each tab, or to first load the data into a ‘master’ search without the constraint and then apply a filter on the master list for each tab ? I also o…

May be one day I’ll have enough time and enthusiasm to sit down and write a detailed summary topic (based on the results of communication with Bubble support and my experience) about :filtered being executed server/client side with examples…

p.s.

@boston85719

I just hope this approach is not picked up by too many newbies, as it just seems to get people off to a really bad start in terms of understanding how to interact with data within Bubble.

That’s true. At least they should understand what they are doing and how it works under the hood instead of following some advices blindly.