Announcing enhanced dynamic filtering for lookup relationships

Announced on | Rollout starts | Rollout ends
August 26, 2025 | August 26, 2025 | August 29, 2025

Zendesk is pleased to announce the availability of dynamic filtering options for lookup relationship fields across standard and custom objects.

This announcement includes the following topics:

What is changing?

Why is Zendesk making this change?

What do I need to do?

What is changing?

Until now, dynamic filtering of lookup relationship fields was only supported for ticket lookup relationship fields based on standard ticket fields, such as Requester, Organization, and Assignee. This was powerful because it provided a way to filter custom object records to only those associated with those fields, such as only being able to select the ticket requester's orders.

However, Zendesk contains a lot of data across many objects and fields that can provide just as much usefulness in filtering. Therefore, you can now build filter data availability in all lookup relationship fields, across all objects.

Additionally, two new operators are now supported for filtering lookup relationship field values: matches and does not match. This makes it possible to include or exclude records based on any field's value. For example, if a ticket has a dropdown field named Product category and a lookup field named Product, it is possible to configure the Product field to only allow the selection of products that match the value in the ticket's Product category field. This sort of filtering on lookup relationship fields can significantly improve the agent and end-user experiences because it displays only relevant options, therein reducing errors and increasing efficiency.

Note: Any existing filters on lookup relationship fields that use the is operator to compare field values to the Requester, Assignee, Organization, or Current user fields will be automatically converted to use the matches operator. They will continue to operate as expected.

Why is Zendesk making this change?

Zendesk received very positive responses to being able to filter ticket lookup relationship fields based on standard ticket fields, which lead to numerous requests for the same functionality for their custom data. Extending support for dynamic filtering to all objects and custom fields as well as adding the new operators means admins can create rich, multi-tiered catalogs and forms throughout Zendesk without needing to write any code.

What do I need to do?

This functionality is available to all accounts. To begin using these features, add or update your lookup relationship fields and configure the field's filtering options.

While this update is available to accounts on all Guide themes, accounts using guide templating version 4 might need to refresh your theme to access these changes. See About templating versions for help center themes.

If you have feedback or questions related to this announcement, visit our community forum where we collect and manage customer product feedback. For general assistance with your Zendesk products, contact Zendesk Customer Support.