How Templates Work

Templates are used to standardize the design of the headers and footers of your documents. When you apply a template to a document, the template design appears as part of the document layout.

However, the template design cannot be edited from the document editor—you can edit only the contents of the document, indicated by a red outline. To make changes to the template, you must open it in the template editor. See Create a Template.

Templates are sometimes referred to as “living” content. When a template is edited and saved, all documents using the template automatically display the updated content. For instance, if you design a template containing a standard header and apply it to multiple documents, any changes made to that template appear automatically in every document that the template was applied to.

In certain cases, you may be better off using a snippet. Consider the following when deciding whether to use templates.

• Templates are best used for applying a common look and feel to a group of documents that will be published to the web (using the Serve Web Page campaign element, for instance). For documents used in a mailing or survey invitation, it is better to add design elements using snippets.

  For example, if a template is applied to a document used by a mailing, and the template is later edited, the mailing is updated in B2C Service to reflect the edits. This occurs even if the mailing has already been sent and the RNM_MOD_SENT_DOCS configuration setting is set to disable the editing of sent documents. If the template is edited after the mailing is sent, and a staff member views the mailing from the mailing editor or the Outreach Activity tab of a recipient’s contact record, the mailing no longer appears as it did when it was sent. This can cause confusion and ambiguity about the effectiveness of the mailing.

• When you insert a snippet, its contents are copied to the layout and can then be edited freely with the rest of the design. You can also edit the snippet at any time without affecting the appearance of layouts to which the snippet was previously applied. See Create a Snippet.
• Another alternative to using templates is to store your design in an HTML file outside of B2C Service and then upload it when you create your mailing or survey. See Upload HTML Content.

If you need to update a template that has been applied to a document, you can click Info on the Home tab ribbon to display the template ID. You can then search for the template in the Templates explorer by clicking Find on the ribbon and selecting ID from the Find Using drop-down list. See Find a Document.

Tip: To see a list of documents that are using a template, you can create a report from the Documents (documents) table that uses the live_rc_id filter. For example, using the Documents table, you could add columns, such as Name, Date Created, Date Updated, and Assigned, and then add the live_rc_id filter to the report to see which templates are returned in the list. See Overview of Creating Custom Reports.

Document templates are not applied when surveys are viewed on mobile devices because templates are not optimized for mobile. However, if you want to create an appropriately sized template to be used for mobile, you could add HTML content with a conditional section for mobile runtime that includes a smaller image. See How You Customize Surveys for Use on Mobile Devices.