Using a template, you can establish design standards for use throughout your company. In large companies, a central development group usually designs and manages templates to provide consistent designs and speed up distribution of new databases. Use a template to standardize similar types of applications -- for example, all discussion databases -- or to store individual design elements, such as fields, forms, views, folders, navigators, and agents that you can use in a variety of applications.

To customize a Designer template, choose File - Database - New Copy to copy the original template and inherit the original design. Give it a different file name in the Copy Database dialog box to prevent future releases from writing over your customized template.

Here's a list of changes you might make when you customize a Designer template:

• Leave the original Designer template properties alone so that existing databases that inherit their design will continue to be synchronized with the template.
• Change the newly copied template file name in the Copy Database dialog box (change File - Database - New Copy) to a name that indicates its intended use.
• Change the newly copied template name (choose File - Database - Properties) to a name that indicates the new template's purpose.
• If existing databases that inherited the original Designer template design need to inherit the design from the newly created template, edit the database properties of those databases to reflect the name of the newly copied template.

• Anyone can quickly and easily create a new database

  Users need to know only one menu selection: choose File - Database - New. They never have to modify the design and don't need to know anything about database design.

• Developers and experienced users can save design time

  Forms, views, and agents copied from a template require no additional design work or updates. Using a pre-designed form or view that contains complex formulas or a large keywords list reduces the chance of design errors and requires less testing time before a database is rolled out.

• Databases appear consistent to users

  View, forms, and fields associated with a template use the same names in all databases. This allows users to apply their knowledge of one database to many databases.

• The template usually does not control the database icon, the About This Database document, and the Using This Database document. If you want an icon, About document, or Using document to inherit all design changes, go into Designer, choose Other - Database Resources, select the icon or document, and make change in the Properties box so that changes are inherited from the template. The default is not inherited. You can also change these design elements by manually copying and pasting the redesigned elements into databases linked to the template.
• Do not create private agents or folders in templates; their changes can't be distributed automatically. If a private agent or folder exists in a template, you receive error messages when the design is refreshed/replaced. In the case of a shared/private-on-first-use folder: if the folder in the template has been opened or tested, a private folder exists and that folder generates errors when you try to refresh a design.
• Databases that inherit their design from a template you create do not contain the ACL entries LocalDomainServers and OtherDomainServers. You must add these entries to the template with brackets as follows: [LocalDomainServers] and [OtherDomainServers].

Templates
Linking a database to a template
Linking individual design elements to a template