Engineering & roadmap
Navigation architecture
A new name. The same foundation. KratosForge is the upcoming name for Fabric Desktop by KratosBI. These guides preserve the app’s current labels and paths.
How Fabric Desktop by KratosBI is organized today, what goes wrong, and a target that keeps what 5,000 people have already learned. The rules in ui-guidelines.md stay: at most 8 rail items, new features become tabs inside existing pages, every page and action registers commands for Ctrl+K, untried features carry a Preview tag.
Current structure (main 3bee0db)#
Clicks are counted from launch, which always opens Home.
- Home (0): Ready to work, sign-in callout, needs your attention, freshness, your workloads, running now and coming up, data mesh map, environments, start something, recent notebooks (8), Estate X-ray
- Create (1): Notebook, Notebook from a template (Preview), Lakehouse
- Workspaces (1): All, Favorites, Pinned. Expand a workspace inline to see every item (2), item preview with Data and Schema (3). Or open the workspace page (2), which lists only lakehouses; lakehouse (3); SQL query (4)
- OneLake (1): Catalog, Data products (Preview), Shortcuts (Preview: All, Health, Access, Changes, Requests), Access (Preview)
- Data mesh (1), or "Set up a metadata project" when there is none. Five groups and 13 segments:
- Design: Entities, Layers, Surrogate keys, Source systems
- Runs: Runs
- Quality: Tests, Table health (Preview)
- Domains (Preview): Domain and workspaces, Data products, Links, Glossary
- Deploy: Environments and promote, Semantic model (Preview)
- Entity page (2-3): about a dozen cards
- Platform (1, Preview): Overview, Landing zone, Business keys, Domains, Glossary, Governance, Requests, Audit, Settings
- Fabric (1): the Fabric portal, embedded
- Monitor (1): Runs, Workloads, Incidents, Agents, Schedules, Cost (all but Runs in Preview), with Fabric's Monitoring hub embedded below
- Bottom: Source control (Preview), Settings (General; Integrations, Preview)
- Rail "open" area: one workspace, one SQL query and one notebook
- Top bar: breadcrumb (7 views), command bar, Git pill, environment picker (Data mesh pages only), bell, account menu
What goes wrong#
| # | Problem | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| N1 | The same thing in two places. Keys (Data mesh > Surrogate keys and Platform > Business keys, with two "New key table" dialogs writing to different stores), sources, domains, glossary, data products, requests, platform setup (Settings and Platform > Settings) | meta.js:909 vs platform.js:236; mesh.js:376 vs platform.js:376; settings.js:318 vs platform.js:404; app.js:937 |
| N2 | Monitor keeps growing. Six segments today, a seventh (Queue) in PRs #145 and #163, an eighth (Run as) being built. Segments mix "what ran" with "who runs it" and "what it cost" | app.js:536-542 |
| N3 | No way back. go() keeps no history, there's no Back, and a restart always opens Home. "Open in Fabric" leaves any page for the Fabric page with no return |
app.js:224-228, app.js:7, app.js:869-878 |
| N4 | Five environment pickers. Top bar (Data mesh pages only, labelled "Data mesh environment"), Platform (defaults to Dev), Monitor, OneLake, Incidents | activity.js:212-226, platform.js:12, app.js:513 |
| N5 | Names that mean two things. Data mesh / metadata / Domains; entity / table; Platform / Fabric side by side; Source control / Source systems; five things called a catalog (one is a dialog titled "OneLake catalog"); "Publish to OneLake" publishes to a workspace | meta.js:94,114,162; app.js:2290; notebook.js:84 |
| N6 | Local work has no home. Notebooks have no list page (only Home's eight recent and Ctrl+K); SQL opens only from a lakehouse; local data projects have no screen | app.js:383; docs/local-data.md |
| N7 | The breadcrumb covers 7 of about 15 views and behaves differently on each. The notebook's workspace crumb isn't clickable; no rail item lights on notebook, incident or agent pages | app.js:261-299, app.js:2402 |
| N8 | A hidden, sticky filter. "Show only items matching" in Ctrl+K filters about 18 lists on every page until the search box is cleared; pages with their own search show two boxes | app.js:2422 |
| N9 | Platform tells a signed-out person "You're a platform admin" when the platform is on this PC only. On a PC-only platform that is probably how the app treats everyone (inferred, not checked), but it reads as a role in Fabric | images/platform-signed-out.png; platform.js:51 |
| N10 | No list of keyboard shortcuts, though the notebook has more than 20 | notebook.js:816-856 |
Target structure#
Focused changes, no new rail items, nothing renamed that people already use except where a name is wrong. A mockup of the changes is attached to the pull request that adds this page.
Rail (unchanged order, 7 main items + 2 bottom; one slot stays free)#
| Rail item | Holds after the change | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Home | Unchanged, with one first-run card instead of three (UX-005) | Content only |
| Create | Today's tiles plus "Your notebooks" (all, searchable), "SQL on this PC" and Local data projects (when built) | Becomes the home for local work (N6, UX-004) |
| Workspaces | Unchanged; the workspace page lists every item type, like the inline expand | Content only |
| OneLake | Catalog, Shortcuts, Access. Data products move to their one home in Data mesh, with a "Data products" filter in the catalog | One fewer tab (N1) |
| Data mesh | Design, Runs, Quality, Domains, Deploy. Business keys, landing zone and glossary are read-only views that link to Platform, where they're managed | No duplicate editing (N1) |
| Platform | Unchanged tabs. Platform setup moves here only (out of Settings). Header says what the role means on a PC-only platform before sign-in | One home for platform-wide things (N1, N9) |
| Fabric | Unchanged | — |
| Monitor | Runs, Schedules, Operations. Operations holds Workloads, Queue, Agents, Run as and Incidents as views in one segment; Cost moved to Optimize > Cost and savings (testing item 36) | Three segments instead of six to eight (N2, UX-010) |
| Source control (bottom) | Unchanged | — |
| Settings (bottom) | General, with Advanced collapsed (App ID, kernel, SQL limits); Integrations | Platform setup leaves (N1, UX-006) |
The free rail slot is kept for a genuinely new kind of work, as the guidelines say. Local data projects don't need it: they are local work, which belongs in Create.
Global#
- Back and forward buttons at the left of the top bar, with Alt+Left and Alt+Right. History holds the view and its tab (UX-008).
- Reopen where you left off: the last view and tab are saved and restored on start.
- One environment picker in the top bar, shown on every page that has an environment (Data mesh, Platform, Monitor, OneLake catalog, Incidents); each page reads the same value (UX-016).
- A breadcrumb on every view below the rail level, each crumb clickable, built from the same history.
- The page filter shows as a chip on the page ("Filtered: sales ×"), and clears when you leave the page.
- Keyboard shortcuts list in the account menu and the command bar ("Keyboard shortcuts"), generated from the same table the handlers use.
Where new and planned features go#
| Feature | Goes in | Not |
|---|---|---|
| Local data projects (FD-LDE) | Create > Local data; SQL page gets a "This PC" target | A new rail item |
| Queue, Run as (workloads 5C, 9A) | Monitor > Operations | New Monitor segments |
| Failure replay bundles (Prove) | Notebook > Prove panel; Activity tray link | — |
| Rollback a release | Data mesh > Deploy | — |
| Measured usage import (FINOPS-003) | Optimize > Cost and savings | — |
| Pipeline definitions (ORCH) | Create (open a pipeline) and Workspaces item preview | A new rail item |
| Governance policies | Platform > Governance (already) | — |
| Fabric workspace Git (Git phase 2) | Source control | — |
Naming decisions to make once#
| Today | Proposed | Why |
|---|---|---|
| "Set up a metadata project", "Metadata version", "Metadata run" | "Set up a data mesh project", "Project version", "Data mesh run" | The rail says Data mesh (Chris's rename); the page should match |
| Surrogate keys / Business keys / key table | Business keys everywhere; "key table" in text | One name for one system |
| "Publish to OneLake" (notebook) | "Publish to Fabric" | It creates a notebook in a workspace |
| OneLake catalog (dialog title for Add data items) | "Add data" | Five catalogs is four too many |
| "Spark SQL runs on this PC" / "Queries run with DuckDB" | "Spark SQL, run on this PC by DuckDB" | One sentence, both facts |
How a new feature finds its place#
- Find the person's task in the table above. Put the feature in that page as a tab, a view inside a tab, a card or an action.
- If it would be a new Monitor segment, a new Platform tab past the current nine, or a new rail item, it needs a UX review and a mockup first.
- Register its commands, its help link and its Preview flag in the same PR.
Need a hand?
Find a fix in troubleshooting, or share a reproducible issue with the community.
Get support ↗Improve this guide on GitHub ↗