Cognite Data Fusion: Explore Assets search and hierarchy view suggestions

Search results in the hierarchy view of Explore Assets is difficult to use. It’s almost impossible to find what you are looking for in a very large/deep hierarchy. We are almost always resorting to the list view and disregarding the hierarchy view entirely since even after searching, one finds themselves scrolling and scrolling to find yellow matches. Because the hierarchy view also shows close matches, the view is littered non-exact matches.

After finding the asset, you can only view children. There is no way to navigate to the parent from the asset view. It is quite useful for us to find an asset and be able to view the ancestry tree to the root and its children.

The ONLY way for us to get the ancestry view of a particular asset goes like:

1. Explore Data → Assets

2. Search

3. Skip Hierarchy view, use List View instead

4. View Details of the Asset, copy the External ID

5. Open Filters

6. Put External ID in filter

7. Finally have a hierarchy view with only the ancestry of a particular Asset

I have some suggestions that may help bring some usability into search. 

1. An option to show exact matches only… for times I know exactly what I am looking for. (99% of the time)

2. Similar to Find in a document search, there needs to be a Next and Previous button that auto-focus on the next match.

3. There needs to be a way to navigate up and down the ancestry tree. One can only descend from Asset to Children. It is impossible to navigate from Asset to Parent. Instead of a Children tab, perhaps just show the Lineage/Ancestry of all Assets in this family tree? Perhaps give the option to show how many degrees up and down from the current asset, in case there are hundreds or more in a family.

4. We are not able to search by ID, this would help allow us to find the exact search.

5. Search box results should not reset, such as the user’s position or search text, via actions in an expanded sheet on the right. EX: Have a very large hierarchy. Search for an Asset via text in Hierarchy view (no filters), something that required scroll down to middle of search results, click on it. Its details are expanded in a sheet on the right. Click any Tab in the sheet. (Children, Asset, …) Search text and position in the search results are fully reset.