A Funnel View shows records organised by a set of ‘states’, typically representing steps in a business process. Each state is represented by a bar whose value is proportionate to the other bars. The only reason this is referred to as a ‘funnel’ is because in many such processes, such as Sales Opportunity Pipeline, or Recruitment Pipeline, the expectation is that there is a large number of records at the top of the process (e.g. Leads), gradually reducing to a smaller number at the bottom (e.g. opportunities Won). This doesn’t have to be the case, of course – the shape may look completely different depending on the business process in question, or when looking at a filtered sub-set of records.

Example Funnel View

The view can be switched between the different numeric values available (if more than one) and the record count by selecting one of the items in the Summary section.

Selecting any of the individual bar values will result in the standard List View being shown with the Filter filter set for just those records.

Developing a Funnel View

Developing a Funnel View is straightforward. The main requirement is that there is a Category set-up as one of the fields on the Record Type to be displayed. The Category contains the individual values that will be the ‘states’ displayed on the Funnel.

The Funnel View itself is a View record, with ViewType of Funnel. The View record requires a unique Name, the RecordTypeName of the record type for which it is to be displayed, an optional Description and IconName (which determines the icon shown to select the view and as its header), an optional ShowCalc being a calculation which determines if the view is to be offered to the current user, and then the all-important Script which contains the actual configuration of the Funnel View.

The Script is used to set a number of variables which are used as the Funnel configuration, as follows:

• categoryfield – the name of the field linked to the Category containing the values that make up the funnel ‘states’ i.e. each bar
• categoryvalues – optional comma-separated list of the values from the Category that should be displayed. If you don’t specify this, then the funnel is made using all the Category values available. However, you will usually want to use this both to specify the exact order in which the values appear (top to bottom), and also potentially to exclude some values that are not relevant to the display (for example, you might exclude opportunities Lost from a Sales Pipeline funnel).
• aggregationfields – optional comma-separated list of field names of the values to be offered for display on the funnel view. If this is not specified, then the funnel will automatically offer all the ‘currency’ fields available on the record type for which the funnel is being displayed.
• toptext, bottomtext, lefttext, righttext – optional template text that will be evaluated and displayed above, below, to the left or right of the funnel bars. You can have any combination of some or all of these templates. All receive as variables the total of each of the numeric field value(s) being displayed (i.e. for the filtered records making up the values shown in the funnel), and the count of displayed records in variable count.
• instructions – optional template text for instructions that will be displayed at the top of the page

Example Blueprint

Note that all script variables are evaluated as calculations, so as you will usually be specifying exact text, it is essential to enclose the values in quotation marks as shown in the example above.

Accessing a Funnel View

A Funnel View can always be accessed from the Record Selection screen for its Record Type.

You can also create a link directly to a Funnel View by linking to its View record and referring to it by name. For example, if you have named your View record My Sales Funnel, you can create a link to it in any template (e.g. on a Page, in a template field etc.) using the displayRecordLink function as follows: