Visualization for showing filters (can be thought of tag cloud)

Elastic Stack Kibana
1

We index data that has 1:1 mapping to a category. There are many categories that we need to show (>20). We want to have a visualization with a list of all the possible categories sorted alphabetically which the users can select to show data for a specific category. As of now, we use Data Table visualization where the metric is "unique count of term", which is always equal to 1. Is there a way to remove that column with "1" values to show only a list of unique terms sorted alphabetically?

This is how I achieve it when I issue request to Elasticsearch:
{index: "myindex", type: "mytype", size: 0, body: { aggs: { results: { terms: { field: "Category", "order": { "_term": "asc" } } } } } }

2

There is no way to remove the count column. However, there is a tagcloud plugin, but it orders and sizes terms by the count or metric value instead of alphabetically.

You will be able to create your own custom plugin that does what you'd like very soon. However, if you want to try your hand at writing one now, you could check out this blog, but be warned that the API is not stable and likely to change.