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A parameter is a named value defined once on the dashboard and referenced by any widget that should respond to it. A country picker, a date range, a metric toggle. Widgets read it when their data is fetched, so changing the default changes what the dashboard publishes. Readers meet parameters as the dashboard’s filters panel.

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Types

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Where the choices come from

A select or multi_select gets its options one of two ways. Static options are a fixed list you author, right for a small stable set. Sourced options come from a data source at refresh time, right when the list is large or data-driven.
Static options are not validated against any data source. If the values feed a fetch argument, such as country codes, tickers or indicator ids, a wrong one fails later inside a refresh rather than when you save it. Have the agent check them against the source’s own lookup tool first.

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Relative dates

Date parameters accept relative expressions instead of a fixed date, resolved in UTC at every refresh. This is how a dashboard says “the last 90 days” and still means it next month. Offsets take a unit of d, w, mo or y, days if omitted. A trailing /unit rounds down to the start of that unit, and weeks start Monday. today and now mean the same thing. Both resolve to a date carrying no time of day, so there is no anchor for “this hour”. Relative expressions work on date and date_range only. A datetime default takes a literal ISO datetime, and integer and decimal take a plain number.

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Defaults are the published baseline

This is the part worth reading twice. A parameter’s default is its only persisted state. Scheduled refreshes render every widget against the defaults, and every reader lands on them when they open the dashboard. When somebody reading a dashboard changes a filter, that change is never written back. The dashboard keeps publishing its defaults, other readers are unaffected, and nobody can alter what a dashboard says by looking at it. What a filter change does do is go into the URL. Applying filters puts the values in the address bar, so you can bookmark a filtered view or send it to a colleague, and opening that link re-runs the dashboard at those values. It runs as whoever opened it, on their own allowance, so a shared drilldown is a question rather than a copy of your answer. Anonymous share links carry no filter values. A link viewer always gets the published baseline. Changing a default is the other thing entirely. It re-baselines the dashboard, so the next refresh publishes at the new value and every reader lands there. That is an edit, not a view.
To try a value without re-baselining, ask Vistazo AI or your agent to explore the dashboard with that parameter overridden. It runs the pipelines and shows you the result while publishing nothing.

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Ordering

Parameters can be given an explicit order in the filters panel. Without one they sort alphabetically by label, which inverts natural sequences, so an unordered Start and End pair lists End first. Author related parameters in reading order, coarse before fine and start before end.