Layout

Layout answers one question: where does each widget sit? The Gallery decides which widgets exist, Layout decides where they go.

The panel is a tree. Each corner and each region is a row, and the widgets it holds are indented under it. Drag a widget to move it from one to another.

The two kinds of place

A widget can live in a corner of the map, floating over it, or in a region of the page, which is a band of its own that pushes the map rather than covering it.

Corners

The four map corners are the classic place for controls. Each corner is a pile, and the pile has an order: index 0 sits closest to the corner. Drag inside the pile to reorder it.

A pile also has an orientation, vertical or horizontal, set from the corner’s own row. Vertical is the default. Horizontal is what you want when a corner holds three small buttons and a vertical stack would run down over the map.

Regions

Two regions frame the map: Header and Footer. A region is off until you enable it, from its card in the Gallery or by dropping a widget into it.

Each region has its own parameters, in the Widget panel like any other entry:

a title, shown as its heading;
a size, small, medium or large;
whether your audience may collapse it.

The Header and the Footer are text bars rather than widget panels, and carry extra text parameters: a description under the title, a background color, a text color (or an automatic contrast derived from the background), a font (sans, serif or mono) and the text alignment. The footer is the thinner of the two — the natural home of a data source or attribution line.

Not every widget can live in a region. The ones that can are the ones designed to render as a panel: the Legend, the Table and an HTML block. Everything else stays a corner widget, and the tree refuses the drop rather than writing a placement that would not render.

Working in the tree

Each row gives you the same handful of actions.

Click the name to open that widget’s parameters in the Widget panel.
Rename it: the display name is what your audience reads, so a Legend can be called What the colors mean.
Remove it from the layout. The widget is not deleted, it returns to its own default corner.
Drag it anywhere it is allowed to go.

What is saved

The whole composition is saved with your web map: which regions are on, what each one is called and how large it is, which widget sits where, in which order and in which orientation. Reopen the map and the page is composed exactly as you left it.

When a map is converted into an application, the layout travels with it. Regions become the application’s own frame, and widgets that have no equivalent in an application are reported rather than silently dropped.