Pattern
Definitions
A governed composition of component contracts that solves a recurring problem — a FAQ section, a pricing comparison, a multi-step content display — carrying the ordering, layout and regulatory-sequencing rules a single contract cannot express
The ruled sense (cwds ADR-0015, 2026-09-18): a pattern composes, a contract defines. It is the Agentic DS draft's sense and the wider field's, and CWDS-the-product uses composite component for assembled layouts. In the later Core proposal, however, a composite is one stateful component with an open slot, not itself a Pattern; do not transfer the product-library meaning to the new kind enum. cwds has no record type for it yet; the first Pattern, Multi-Step Content Display, is written as a contract until one exists.
Before 2026-09-18, the cwds record unit — intent, anatomy, token contract — now called a Component Contract
Records, ADRs and findings dated before the ruling keep the word and mean the unit by it; they are not rewritten. Read Pattern in a dated cwds document as Component Contract, and write Component Contract from here on.
In the APG, a blueprint for building one accessible component — the roles and attributes it needs, the keyboard interaction it owes, and a working example
A third sense, and the one a front-end engineer meets most often. It is prescriptive where the design-system sense is compositional: an APG pattern tells you what Escape must do in a dialog, not how dialogs combine into a page. The two meet where a Component Contract has to state keyboard behavior — the APG is where that behavior comes from rather than being invented.
A reusable flow, like signing in or checking out
The everyday product sense, and the one that gets confused with component. Useful in conversation; not what the design-system sense means.
The word for a composition, not for the thing composed. Ask "which patterns do we have?" and the answer is a list of arrangements — what goes above what, and which order a regulated market insists on — not a list of parts.
The chain
Component Contract → Component (AEM) and Block (EDS); a Pattern composes two or more contracts. If an Element sits between a contract and its realizations — a platform-agnostic markup source — the realizations are converted from it; if not, the contract's anatomy and token contract are what each realization is checked against. Both shapes exist in this estate today.
Avoid: using Pattern for the record that defines one thing (that is a Component Contract), or for a concrete implementation (that is an Element, Component or Block).
The ruling
Three artifacts used the word for three things: the Agentic DS draft for a composition of components; cwds for the contract unit of one thing (what the draft calls a Component Schema); CWDS-the-product for a composite component. Two of the three already meant a composition, and cwds met its first one — Multi-Step Content Display — on the day it had to choose. cwds ADR-0015 ruled on 2026-09-18: the unit is a Component Contract, and Pattern is freed for compositions. Still open, for the sync: whether component contract or component schema is the primary name in this glossary — the alias covers the other.
The record the draft proposes
The Agentic DS draft's Patterns page (2026-09-24) proposes a record type
for a Pattern. It has channels, a composition of roles and constraints
across roles. It adds prose a11y requirements, a layout built only from
tokens, and a sparse contentModel that may only narrow what its
components allow. A role references a component directly, nests inside a
real slot of another component, or forms a repeating group whose
container is a container-kind component. Patterns are the top of that
hierarchy. A page that arranges them is what this glossary calls a
Template, and the draft calls an instance.