VCF Operations Dashboard Sharing and Folders

I'm always logged into VCF Operations as local admin when creating content, but was doing some work recently as a non-admin user and came across something I thought was interesting. Namely, how Dashboard Folders work.

As a quick review, remember when you create a Dashboard you own it and only you can see it, until you share it. We've discussed sharing Dashboards (and making them editable by others) before here. In this particular case, I created a Dashboard as a non-admin account, shared it, and wanted to put it in the Custom Dashboards folder.

The Custom Dashboards Folder had been created by admin and contained several shared Dashboards. I could see them here (logged in as a non-admin account).

As you can see, I'm logged in as brockp and can see the Custom Dashboards folder with Dashboards in it. I created a Dashboard and wanted to put it in this folder, but when I went to do that I got this.

The ACTIONS dropdown doesn't give us anything. So I selected NEW FOLDER and created a "new folder" called Custom Dashboards. Then I put my New Dashboard in it.

Once done I clicked SAVE.

And there it is, in the Custom Dashboards folder. I originally thought this was a bug, but it's not! Folders aren't really constructs in VCF Operations, they are just Dashboard attributes and get prepended to the name of Dashboard itself. Inspecting the contents of a Dashboards export (the json), they show like this.

Keep this in mind when you're creating Dashboards and want to put them in an existing Folder, you must create the Folder first (exact same name, spacing, etc), then put them in it. There wasn't much discussing this out on the Google/AI machine, so there is now :). Hope it was helpful!