Configure Unplanned Sidebar

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What the unplanned sidebar does

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Prerequisites

• A Planningboard widget already embedded in a Polarion LiveDoc or Wiki page.
• Access to the widget parameters editor (expand the widget’s tools menu and click Edit).

1

Confirm the sidebar is visible

The unplanned sidebar can be toggled with the Show Unplanned toolbar button (the panel icon). If the sidebar is not visible:

1. Locate the toolbar in the upper-left corner of the Planningboard.
2. Click Show Unplanned to toggle the sidebar on.

The sidebar appears on the right. Your preference is saved between sessions.

2

Configure the parent hierarchy depth

The sidebar can group cards under their parent work items, showing a tree structure. The depth is controlled by the PARAMETER_US_DEPTH widget parameter, which sets how many levels of parent work items are loaded.

1. Open the widget parameters editor (expand tools → click Edit).
2. Find the Unplanned Sidebar section.
3. Set the depth value:

Depth value	Effect
0	No parent grouping — all cards appear as a flat list
1	Cards grouped under their immediate parent
2	Two levels of parent hierarchy shown

Loading more levels of parent hierarchy means more work items fetched from Polarion. For large backlogs, keep the depth at 1 or 2. Deep hierarchies on large projects can slow sidebar loading noticeably.

The parent-child relationships are determined by the PARAMETER_PARENTS_LINK_ROLE parameter, which specifies which Polarion link role defines the parent relationship. Set this to the link role ID used in your project for parent-child links (for example, parent).Example widget parameter configuration:

PARAMETER_US_DEPTH=1
PARAMETER_PARENTS_LINK_ROLE=parent

With these settings, the sidebar groups each card under its direct parent, and uses the parent link role to resolve the hierarchy.

3

Add custom queries to the sidebar

You can predefine Polarion queries that users can activate from the sidebar filter, making it easy to surface specific subsets of unplanned cards without typing a query each time.

1. In the widget parameters editor, locate the Queries section.
2. Add one or more named queries. Each query has a display name and a Lucene query string.

Example: Create a query named Reviewed with the Lucene query status:reviewed. When a user clicks the funnel icon in the sidebar and selects Reviewed, the sidebar shows only cards with status reviewed.

Define a query for your sprint-ready states (for example, status:approved) so the planning team can quickly see which backlog items are ready to drag into the next iteration — without scrolling through unrelated cards.

4

Configure sidebar fields

When a user clicks a card in the unplanned sidebar, the Work Item Properties sidebar opens showing configurable fields. These are set via the PARAMETER_SIDEBAR_FIELDS widget parameter (defaults to title, status, plannedIn).

1. In the widget parameters editor, find Sidebar Fields.
2. Add the field IDs you want users to see when clicking a card.

PARAMETER_SIDEBAR_FIELDS=title,status,plannedIn,assignee

Users can also personalize their sidebar view using the Select Fields (gear icon) button in the sidebar. Fields added this way apply only to that user and affect all work items of the same type.

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Using sidebar filters at runtime

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Verification

• The unplanned sidebar showing cards grouped under parent items (if PARAMETER_US_DEPTH is 1 or higher).
• The funnel icon in the sidebar, with your custom queries listed when clicked.
• The sidebar header showing an item count in the format X out of Y work items.
• Dragging a card from the sidebar onto a Plan column assigns it and removes it from the sidebar.

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See also

• Widget Parameters Overview
• Configure Work Items Dataset
• Manage Unplanned Backlog
• Drag and Drop Planning
• Basic Board Interactions