Another way to think about this. I need to write a controller extension on my participants object that takes a bunch of search parameters and uses dynamic soql to get a list of participants I can’t use filters on a skuid model, because they only filter on values that are in the model… and i can’t include all the disabilities because that will return multiple rows per participant so i need a skuid model i can attach to the output of the customer controller’s search method and the ability to submit the search values from the skuid page and invoke the search method … which should change the contents of my list

Is it feasible for you to have a separate table on the participant-disability join object? That way you can include & filter on fields from both objects.

So if I have a separate table for participant disability, are the filters for disability on that table ? I need to filter on several detail tables at the same time, both disability and race for example I think I going to have to do this in visualforce

yeah i think you could do the disability filters on that table. meh. there may be a better way to do it than this, but not one that comes to my mind.

I had a different approach come to mind. Imagine a tabbed form where each tab allowed you to filter participants in different ways. There might be 8 tabs, of which you actually set 3 filters then you have one “cummulative” tab that shows the participants that are in all of the 3 filtered models. The combination could be done by javascipt on the client. It might actually be helpful to the user to see which set of filters is bringing in which participants.

that sounds like it could be pretty cool

Hello Anna, this is exactly the problem I have. How would you do that?

Start with creating your model on the join object.  This allows you to bring in fields from the lookups that go both ways (in Ken’s case fields from both the participant record and the disability record.)  Similarly conditions (and therefore filters) can be built on both parent models. 

This will let you display the correct dataset.   Unfortunately you will not be able to edit the data in those secondary objects.  Using a more standard list page to detail page paradigm is usually what is done here - though you can use the queue component to achieve what you are seeking in a single page. 

We still do not have a mechanism for building conditions on children relationships. 

thanks Rob for pointing this out. I can circumvent this problem, if there is any JS Event that get’s fired when changing a filter → see http://gsfn.us/t/4a5hf. Maybe you could shed some light on this.

Actually, what I need to do it write a chain of filters. I start with a list of participants. Then filter for participants that meet some condition… then generate a list that is an intersection of those 2 lists… then filter for participants with another condition…and intersect that list with the list i’m “passing through”… I don’t know how many filters there will be (3 to 5), so generating a sequence of results and combining them lets me do it dynamically. I really suspect that this will need to be done in apex…

Ken that makes my head hurt.  

But I can’t see why a set of 5 filters on a single table couldn’t achieve the same result?  Filters get executied together as “and” statements - so you’d use  filter 1 to find contacts in South Carolina,  then filter 2 to get contacts who were Accountants, and finally filter 3 on Soda Preference = Coke to get your specific target set of contacts. 

That sounds too easy though.