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About User Interface Page Templates for Self-Service Applications

Siebel Self-Service Applications use templates for all content pages. Pages contain a context-based menu, global icons, product branding, an error message placeholder, and various placeholders for developers to attach and render content.

A typical Siebel E-Support page is shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4. Example Page Layout

Menus and branding information are at the top, sidebars (such as for searching and for displaying menu trees) are on the left side, useful links are on the right side, and the main page content is in the middle.

The underlying template structure for this page is shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5. Page Template Structure

Every page in Siebel Self-Service Applications starts from a standard page skeleton, allowing developers to concentrate on the application-specific display contents. The page skeleton, a .jspx file, provides an af:panelBorder tag to encapsulate the content.

The af:panelBorder tag includes references to a page header region and a page footer region. The purpose of these regions is to render the top and bottom portions of a page; they include branding information, menus, copyright information, and other similar components.

Template indirection is used to avoid the hard coding of any image or .jspx filename used for regions. For more information about template indirection, see About Template Indirection.

For more information about page templates, see the following topics:

• Standard Page Skeleton File
• af:panelBorder Tag and Facets
• Regions
• Page Header
• Page Footer
• Error Messages and Generic Error Page
• Service Request Page Example for Siebel E-Support