The Design Center is the principal area where all screen forms and built in user reports, along with the formatting and logic behind them, is configured. The screen forms and built-in reports are designed using layouts. You may also create and design your own layouts, embedding them within the built-in layouts. In this way you can build reuseable layouts that can be embedded within many other layouts.
The design center is where you bring together fields, embedded layouts, along with attributes to build the finished layouts of the Add Issue, Edit Issue, Query Filters and other screen layouts. In addition, built in reports such as the Quicklist and the Detailed Report also use layouts defined within the Design Center. Layouts can be defined for different user roles within your system, offering a tremendous amount of flexibility. See the section on Inheritance for additional details. Each layout is built on top of a Layout Type. You may create and define fields within the Design Center, or you may use the Data Dictionary for this purpose.
Layouts work in conjunction with security permissions for each field. Therefore, simply placing a field on a screen does not automatically give all users the ability to read or write to the field. You can alter the permissions to each field within the Design Center, or you may use the Security Permissions option to define which fields are visible and updateable to each group of users. The security privilege for the field overrides the fact that a field may be placed on a screen or report.
A layout may be embedded within another layout. Indeed, you may specify alternate layouts that appear, dependent upon the value of a specific field. For example, you may have a category field that has the values of Software, Hardware and Documentation. Depending on which value is chosen, an embedded layout can be displayed that contains the fields pertinent to gathering the information needed about each of these categories. These embedded layouts may only be embedded within an Add or Edit Issue layout.
Fields within each layout may have one or more attributes defined. These layout cell attributes affect the display of the field or the way in which it is processed. For example, a layout cell attribute may provide the field with an alternate title, just for the one layout, or the attribute may define that the field is only visible if another field is of a specific value. There are two special type of layouts which may only be embedded within other layouts. These allow the definition of Related Issue Layouts and Repeating Row Layouts.