Two people looking at the same data often need different controls around it. A sales manager scrolling through the pipeline needs bulk actions and group-level filters; a new hire just needs to be able to open cards. A support lead wants a prominent "assign to me" button on their triage view; their manager wants a filter bar that lets them pivot by team. The data they're looking at is the same. The buttons, the panels, and the templating around that data are not. View layouts separate the what — which fields and records are shown — from the how it's surrounded — which controls and supplemental content appear around them.
A layout is the area between the navigation and the raw viewer: the header, the button bar, the filter strip, the viewer settings panel, the inline templated content, the footer. Each of those zones is configurable. An administrator can add a custom button to the top bar — a shortcut to a common action, a link to a related dashboard, a one-click export — or remove noise that doesn't apply to a particular audience. An inline template can appear above or below the viewer to provide context, summary metrics, or guidance. Filter controls can be arranged for the workflow this audience actually uses, rather than the generic superset.
The feature's design principle is reuse without forking. The view itself — its query, its columns, its sort order, its grouping — stays canonical. The layout overlays it. That way, a change to the view's underlying query propagates to every layout that uses it, and the layouts don't quietly drift into parallel implementations of slightly-different queries. One source of truth for the data, many presentations for the people looking at it.
Per-viewer overrides are where layouts start to feel genuinely flexible. A layout can carry different button bars for the kanban rendering versus the table rendering of the same view — because the actions that make sense while dragging cards across columns aren't always the same as the actions that make sense while scanning a spreadsheet of the same data. It can supply a custom filter strip that only appears when the viewer is a calendar. It can tune viewer settings — card content, thumbnail width, grouping defaults — per viewer, all within a single layout definition.
Viewer switching within a layout is permitted or locked down per design. Sometimes the layout exists precisely to nudge users into a particular rendering — a customer-service triage view is probably meant to stay a kanban — and the viewer picker can be hidden. Other times the layout is a shell around whichever viewer the user prefers, and the picker is visible. Both are a single toggle.
Advanced template configuration is the escape hatch that keeps layouts from getting rigid. Any zone can host a templated block — a bit of the canvas page builder's rendering, populated with the view's context — so a layout can carry a summary panel, a set of KPI cards, an explanatory paragraph, or a team photo, without that content becoming a separate page. The result is a viewer that feels purpose-built for its audience without any of it having been built from scratch.
Rolling out a layout to a role closes the loop. A tenant can ship the sales-manager layout as the default for users in the Sales Management role and a simpler layout as the default for individual salespeople, all backed by the same view. Each audience lands on the experience that fits them. If their needs change, the tenant adjusts the layout — not the view, not the query, not the data model.
There is a point at which a layout isn't enough. When the page wants to be a fully designed experience — multiple data sources, bespoke composition, a printed-report feel, a customer-facing aesthetic — the canvas page builder takes over. Layouts sit between "pick a viewer" and "design a page from scratch," and that's exactly the middle ground where most per-role adjustments naturally live. They're the tool to reach for when you want the data of an existing view but the surrounding experience of something bespoke — without actually building something bespoke.