Board Views (Kanban)

In this tutorial, you’ll create a board — a Kanban view of your model — and use it to manage element status by dragging cards between columns.

Prerequisites: You’ve completed Catalogs & Tables and have several Application Component elements in your Farquind project. The element type needs an enumeration property to group by — for example, a Lifecycle Status with literals like Active, Retiring, and Retired.

What you’ll build: A board showing Farquind’s applications as cards, arranged in columns by lifecycle status.

1. What is a Board?

A board is the third way to look at your model, alongside diagrams and catalogs. It shows the instances of one element type as cards, arranged in columns — one per literal of an enumeration property. Moving a card to a different column writes that property’s value onto the element.

Boards are useful for:

• Tracking status or stage across many elements (application lifecycle, initiative progress, request triage)
• Managing work-in-progress with a visual, drag-driven workflow
• Seeing at a glance how elements are distributed across a set of states

Like diagrams and catalogs, a board is a live view of the model — there’s no separate save. A card you drag updates the element immediately, and the change shows up in catalogs, the Properties panel, and other collaborators’ boards.

2. Create a Board

1. Right-click the M1 Farquind Applications package in the Explorer
2. Select New Board…
3. In the New Board dialog, choose the element type for the cards — Application Component
4. The name fills in as Application Component Board 1. Type over it if you want something else
5. Choose the group-by property — Lifecycle Status
6. Click Create Board

The board opens straight away.

The type list only offers types that can actually form columns — those with an enumeration property, their own or inherited. The dialog says so above the list, so a type you expected to see but don’t is explained rather than simply missing. If a type has exactly one such property it is chosen for you, so step 5 is already done.

3. Read the Columns

The board creates one column per literal of the group-by property, plus a leading (No value) column:

Column	Contains
(No value)	Cards whose Lifecycle Status isn’t set yet
Active	Cards with status Active
Retiring	Cards with status Retiring
Retired	Cards with status Retired

Every Application Component appears as a card, tinted with its type’s notation colour. Components you haven’t classified yet sit in (No value).

4. Move Cards

Drag a card from (No value) to Active. That’s it — the element’s Lifecycle Status is now Active. Drag it to Retiring and the value updates again. Dropping a card back onto (No value) clears the property.

Open the same element in a catalog or the Properties panel and you’ll see the value the board set. The board isn’t storing anything of its own here — it’s editing the model.

5. Order Cards

By default, cards sort by name. Use the Order by control in the board toolbar to change this — Name, Newest first, Recently updated, and so on.

Choose Manual to arrange cards by hand: drag them up and down within a column to set an explicit order. Manual order is remembered with the board. (In the automatic sort modes, dragging a card within its column doesn’t stick — it snaps back to the sort.)

6. Set a WIP Limit

Work-in-progress limits give you a gentle nudge when a column gets crowded:

1. Right-click the Active column header
2. Choose Set WIP Limit…
3. Enter a number — say, 8

The column header now shows a count like 6 / 8. When the count goes over the limit, the badge turns amber. The limit only warns — it never blocks a drop.

7. Tune the Board

The toolbar and column controls let you shape the view:

• Group by — switch to a different enumeration property (this resets the column layout)
• Card fields — choose which property values show on each card
• Column chooser — show, hide, and reorder columns
• Add card — the + at the foot of a column asks for a name, then creates an element already set to that column’s value

What You’ve Learned

• What a board is and how it relates to diagrams and catalogs
• How to create a board and choose its element type and group-by property
• How dragging a card writes an enumeration property value
• How to order cards, including manual ranking
• How to set work-in-progress limits and tune columns and cards

Next Steps

• How to configure a board view — A task-focused reference for columns, grouping, and WIP limits
• Catalogs & Tables — The same elements as a sortable, editable table