Views in the Explorer window enable you to categorize information in System Architect encyclopedias. A view is a container that does not provide a separate namespace for the artifacts contained in it. There are two types of views: static views and dynamic views.

To populate static views, drag artifacts (diagrams and definitions) into them from another Explorer (you can launch more than one at a time).

To populate dynamic views, specify and run one or more reports. The default View is named “All” and it contains all repository artifacts.

You can use Views to make your Enterprise Architecture more manageable from both a user and a viewer perspective. You might want to create Views for departments of your organization: for example, Marketing, Sales, Development, Product Management, Shipping and so on. You could then put models into the View that each respective part of the organization is responsible for. The artifacts of these models would still belong to a global namespace: for example a business process called "Customer Requests Product" existing in two different Views would have the same "Customer Requests Product" definition. You might also use Views to break up your architecture into Projects, or simply group all the diagrams and definitions of interest to you, making it easier for you to access the diagrams and definitions that you work on most, without the need to sift through those you work on least, or not at all.

You add views to an encyclopedia using the Explorer. You can open one or more Views by selecting View > Explorer. You can create tabs at the bottom of the Explorer; in each tab, create your own views by right‑clicking in the views workspace and then clicking New View.