Beyond the list view and the form view, Odoo has the Kanban view, a particularly visual way of seeing records. This piece is about Kanban views in Odoo.
What a Kanban view is
A Kanban view presents records as cards, arranged into columns. Each record is a card, showing some of its information, and the cards are grouped into columns. The Kanban view is a visual presentation: rather than a list of rows, it is a board of cards, where the eye can take in how the records are distributed across the columns.
What Kanban views are for
The Kanban view is particularly suited to records that move through stages. Where a kind of record has a stage, a state it is in, and records move through those stages, a Kanban view with the columns being the stages is a natural fit: each record is a card in the column of its stage, and the board shows, at a glance, how the records are distributed across the stages, how much is at each stage, what is moving. This is exactly the right view for things like a pipeline of opportunities, or work moving through stages, the Kanban view shows the flow. So Kanban views are for records where the visual, by-stage presentation genuinely suits them, especially records that move through stages.
Building a Kanban view
A Kanban view, in Odoo, is defined in XML, in a module's views, like the other views. The developer builds the Kanban view by defining how the records are presented as cards and how they are grouped into columns: what each card shows, and what the columns are, often the stages. Building the Kanban view is defining that visual, card-and-column presentation of the kind of record.
Building a good Kanban view
Building a good Kanban view is about making the board a genuinely useful at-a-glance picture. The cards should show the information that genuinely helps a user understand a record at a glance, enough to be useful, not so much that the card is cluttered. The columns should be the genuine, sensible grouping, the stages, where the records move through stages. A good Kanban view, with useful cards and sensible columns, gives a genuine at-a-glance picture of the records and, where they move through stages, of the flow. Building it well means making that picture genuinely clear and useful.
Choosing the Kanban view where it suits
An honest note. The Kanban view is one of the ways records can be presented, and it is the right choice where the visual, card-and-column, often by-stage, presentation genuinely suits the records. For records that genuinely move through stages, a Kanban view is genuinely valuable. For records where that visual presentation does not genuinely suit them, the list view or another may be the better way to see them. A developer should provide a Kanban view where it genuinely suits the kind of record, particularly where the records move through stages.
The takeaway
Kanban views in Odoo present records as cards arranged into columns, a visual presentation where the eye takes in how records are distributed. The Kanban view is particularly suited to records that move through stages, with the columns being the stages, so the board shows the flow at a glance. A developer builds a Kanban view in XML, defining the cards and the columns, and builds it well by making the cards genuinely useful at a glance and the columns a sensible grouping. Provide a Kanban view where it genuinely suits the records. For how we approach Odoo, see our ERP practice.