Control cells

Designed to give more power to your audience

Introduction

The Count canvas is built for more than just static reports. Adding controls to your canvas transforms them into interactive reports and documents.

What are interactive controls?

Interactive controls are special cells that enable readers to interact with a shared canvas. Each control produces a table of one or more values that your readers can edit, that can be referenced just like any other cell.

You can create the following types of interactive controls:

• Number input - a number input

• Slider input - a slider input to select a value

• Toggle input - an on/off field

• String input - a free-form text entry field

• Date picker - a date selection

• Single select - a drop-down to allow selection of a single element of a column (max 1,000 results)

• Multiple select - a drop-down to allow selection of multiple elements from a column (max 1,000 results).

• Table filter - a field to add filters to a table

How to add an interactive control

Use the canvas toolbar to insert control cells:

How to connect to your queries

There are a few things to know about control cells in order to connect them to your queries:

Control cells are tables

Control cells have one column called value that contains the current value of the control cell. When referred to as tables, this column can be referenced in SQL. When referred to using Jinja, the value of the control cell is exposed directly.

Reference control cells using their name

Inject them anywhere in your SQL

As control cells are just tables, you can add them into your WHERE statements to filter values, into the logic of a new column, or any other way you can think of!

You can either refer to control cells using pure SQL, or using Jinja templates.

Users of Redshift may encounter errors when referencing control cells using SQL - see this limitation and workaround.

Customize control cell appearance

When you think about how you want others to interact with control cells, you can customize:

• the title (or prompt) the user sees

• where the control cell is located

• the options available

• the default values selected

• the font and format of the control

Allow users to change control cells

Control cells will behave differently depending on whether a user has edit or view access to a canvas, and whether the canvas is locked or unlocked.

The table below summarizes how these two states interact:

🔐 / Access	Canvas Editor	Canvas Viewer
Unlocked canvas	✅ Can edit control cells 👁 Edits are visible to everyone	❌ Cannot edit control cells 👁 Can see edits to control cells made by editors
Locked canvas	✅ Can edit control cells 🙈 Can only see their own edits	✅ Can edit control cells 🙈 Can only see their own edits

In summary, if you want a canvas to act like a typical dashboard or notebook where many users are using filters independently then make sure you lock the canvas, but if you intend to use the canvas as a collaborative space, then keep the canvas unlocked and invite contributors to be editors.

Read more about how locking affects canvases here:

Real-time collaboration