The Screen System: Build Any Page
Traditional business applications have fixed page types. A list page looks a certain way. A detail page has a specific structure. Dashboard pages follow a template. These structures are encoded in the application; they can be configured at the margins but not fundamentally changed.
The Screen System replaces fixed layouts with configurable structures called Screens.
What Is a Screen?
A Screen is a page definition. It describes what components appear on the page, how they're arranged, what data they display, and how they respond to user interactions.
Screens are stored as configuration — not as templates, not as compiled layouts, but as plain definitions that the platform reads at runtime. Changing a Screen definition changes the page immediately.
Build Any Page Structure
Because Screens are fully configurable, you can build page structures that match your actual use cases rather than conforming to what the platform decided pages should look like.
A dashboard Screen might combine a metrics row, a calendar overview, and three filtered data tables showing open items across different record types — all visible at once, all live data.
A detail Screen for a complex record might split into tabs: main information in one tab, related documents in another, timeline history in a third, and embedded sub-records in a fourth.
A process Screen might show a step-by-step form flow with validation gates between stages, rather than a traditional record form.
None of these require custom development. They're configurations of the Screen system's components.
Data Sources Are Configurable
Each component on a Screen gets its data from a configured source. A data table reads from a query against a specific object type with defined filters. A metrics card reads from an aggregation. A detail panel reads a single record by ID from the URL.
Data sources can be parameterized: a customer detail Screen reads customer data based on the customer ID in the URL. Related orders use that same customer ID as a filter. The page is data-complete for whatever record the user navigated to.
Screens Connect to Navigation
Screens register themselves with URL patterns. A Screen with the pattern /customers/{id} handles any URL matching that pattern, making the customer ID available to all components on the page.
Navigation items in menus link to Screen URLs. The routing system connects the URLs to the right Screens, the Screens describe the layout, and the components render the data. The pieces connect cleanly.
The Result
The Screen System means the platform ships with a layout engine, not with pages. Your pages are the Screens you configure. That's a meaningful distinction — it means the platform doesn't limit your page designs to what its developers imagined when they built it.