Watchlists not following source workbook

Question

Hi all,

I was using watchlists and I've noticed the resulting "cards" do not follow the source dashboard. This means that anything that is added in the watchlist keeps the filters and settings that were on at the time the user has clicked on "Add to watchlist", regardless of the future changes to the source workbook/visualization.

This is a little counter-intuitive to me, because that defeats the purpose of having a watchlist if it's not live or if a metric definition changes with time.

For example, say I add a Revenue tile from a workbook into my watchlists. I will have the revenue show as 100k for a given month (which matches the workbook at that specific time). Now I've tried selecting a different month that has 150k in Revenue. The watchlist will still show 100k in my homepage. Does that mean the watchlist card will forever show the same amount? Am I missing something?

Thank you!

Jacques V.-Oracle · Accepted Answer

Remember that workbooks are shared. I'm sure you would not want to have your watchlist change based on someone else interactions. This is why we 'snapshot' the context when you add it to the Watchlist.

Having said that, your use-case is very true that if you added a card when you were filtering on a specific month, then your 'card' will be static.

The right model for your use case is to use relative dates in the workbook. So, if your workbook is filtered on last month, this month, last quarter, etc then the card will be dynamic over time.

Having said all this, there is a roadmap item to allow a user to tune the context of card after it is added to the watchlist.

Cheers

Jacques