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Forgive us! These docs are a work in progress. Some pages may be incomplete or describe features that aren't quite finished yet. Farkitect is in early development and we don't recommend using it for real work just yet. Feel free to explore — just be aware that things are still being built.

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?

Section titled “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

Section titled “2. Create a Board”
  1. Right-click the M1 Farquind Applications package in the Explorer
  2. Select New Board…
  3. Choose the element type for the cards — Application Component
  4. Choose the group-by property — Lifecycle Status
  5. The board opens, auto-named Application Component Board and ready to rename

If the element type has only one enumeration property, step 4 is skipped. If it has none, Farkitect tells you — a board needs an enumeration property to form its columns, so add one to the element type first.

3. Read the Columns

Section titled “3. Read the Columns”

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

ColumnContains
(No value)Cards whose Lifecycle Status isn’t set yet
ActiveCards with status Active
RetiringCards with status Retiring
RetiredCards 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

Section titled “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

Section titled “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

Section titled “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

Section titled “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 creates a new element already set to that column’s value

What You’ve Learned

Section titled “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

Section titled “Next Steps”