Screen agent enables choosing a screen template according to the current device and display parameters. For example, you can create two screens with different layouts (and possibly different functionality), and register them in screens.xml with the same identifier. Then at runtime, the platform will choose a screen that better conforms to the display from which the user accesses the application.

There are three predefined screen agents in the platform: DESKTOP, TABLET, PHONE. They are defined by the following classes respectively: DesktopScreenAgent, TabletScreenAgent, PhoneScreenAgent. You can define your own agents by creating managed beans implementing the ScreenAgent interface.

A screen agent is specified for a screen in the screens.xml file. The value of the agent attribute should be either one of the predefined constants listed above or a name of the custom bean implementing ScreenAgent.

In Studio, an agent is specified on the Properties tab of the screen designer page.