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Put an existing query on a board

You already have a saved query that returns the work you care about: the business requests this quarter, say, from "Let customers report a claim without calling us" down to "Retire the paper claim form", and you want to look at it as a board right now, without creating anything. The query results page has a Board tab that does exactly that, and an Aging WIP tab beside it that plots the same query's work in progress by age.

Before you start

Any query type works. A Flat list of work items boards exactly what it returns. A Tree of work items or a Work items and direct links query is flattened first: every distinct item in the result, roots, parents and children alike, becomes one card, each item once, in the order the query returned them. The link structure itself stays in the query; the board reads the result, it does not redraw the hierarchy.

Steps

  1. Open your query in Azure DevOps and run it.
  2. Select the Board tab on the results page, beside Results, Editor and Charts.
  3. If the page cannot tell which query you are looking at, it asks instead: Pick a saved query to show as a board:. Choose one under Select a query and press Show board.
  4. Drag a card to another column to change its state, or drag it up and down inside a column to reorder it.
  5. Select the funnel in the row above the board to filter the cards. The filter bar starts closed on this page.
  6. Select Aging WIP for the same query's work in progress plotted by how long each item has been in flight. On a saved query, a filter you set on one of the two tabs is still applied when you open the other.

What you should see

One row above the board: how many items the query returned (or, while a filter is on, how many of them it leaves, such as 3 of 10 items), then the funnel, Refresh and More actions. The query's name is not repeated, because the page already shows it above the tabs, and there are no Board, List or Aging WIP tabs inside the board: the page's own tabs are the views.

Below it, one column per state of the work item type, in state-category order (proposed, in progress, resolved, completed), each column headed by its name and the number of items in it. Removed-category states never become columns, and a line above the board counts the items sitting in them. If the query returns more than one type, the columns are the states of the type that occurs most often. Cards of the other types still go to the column matching their own state; only where a state has no column at all does a warning appear, naming that state: Some cards have work item types whose states do not match the columns for "…". They appear in Unmapped: (…). Filter the query to matching work item types, or review those cards in Unmapped.

Notes

The Board tab's ad-hoc board has no stored configuration, so its header has no Settings, no Copy link and no Back: cards show Assigned To and Tags, and there are no WIP limits, style rules, tag colors, split columns or swimlanes. Everything else is the real thing: drags write to the work items, the revision check and the process-rule gating apply, and Refresh, As of and the filter bar all work. The one exception: on a tree or direct-links query the As of control is not offered, because Azure DevOps cannot answer a point-in-time snapshot for a link query.

If you reload the page, or open a link or go Back to a page with Board or Aging WIP selected, Azure DevOps shows the tab selected but leaves it empty. Select the tab again and it loads. Azure DevOps does this for every extension's tab on the query page.

The tab you choose is the view: Board always opens the board and Aging WIP the chart, whatever you last used elsewhere in AnyKanban. On a saved query, the filter you leave on is remembered for you against that query, on both tabs, and the filter bar opens to show it the next time; closing the bar clears it. Nobody else's view changes, and an unsaved query remembers nothing.

When the query's own sort is what keeps the cards from being reordered, the row shows Order: query. Hover over it or move to it with the keyboard to read why, and select it to open Put a column in priority order. On the hub the same fact is a notice above the board. A board of backlog items shows neither, because sorting the query differently would not turn reordering on there; the card's own menu says why, where its reorder entries would be.

The hub has an ad-hoc board of its own: the link ?query=<query id> on the AnyKanban hub address, described in Give a board a link you can put in a wiki page, opens a board over that query with no definition either. It has no Settings and the same plain cards, but because it lives in the hub it does have Copy link and Back. That one you can keep. Open More actions and select Save as board: the settings panel opens with the query already chosen, you add a name and a work item type and select Create, and the named board opens in place of the ad-hoc one with Settings and its own link. The Board tab on query results does not offer this, because there is no board list there to put the result in.

Manual ordering uses your process's own order field, derived for the board's type, so reordering works wherever that field exists on the type. If it does not, a warning names the field and moves between columns keep working. On a board of backlog items (stories, features, epics) the order is the backlog's own: cards follow it unless the query sorts by something else, and in-column dragging is deliberately inert whatever the query sorts by, as Put a column in priority order explains. Only a named board can turn reordering on for backlog items, so the Board tab never does.