Templates

Templates are detail pages in Aspen, and contain several fields about a record. For example, by default, the Student Detail page contains the selected student’s name, year of graduation, and other demographic information.

Templates are written in XML (eXtensible Markup Language) which is a series of user-defined tags, similar to HTML. Aspen’s template editor has a graphical user interface to help make it easier to write XML.

Key points to keep in mind when editing templates:

• Use property tags to identify Data Dictionary fields.
• Nest property tags inside various layout tags to create the layout of the template.
• Each template has a root data table, such as:
  • Student table
  • Staff table
  • Course table
• If it can be displayed on a field set, it can be displayed on a template.
• Templates are associated with the Nav ID (name/location) of the screen.

Elements of a template

The template is the root element, and all other template elements are sub-elements.

Types of templates

There are two types of templates:

• Block-based
• Form

You can create custom help for templates, to assist users in entering information on a page.

Note: Some templates are not shown in the URL. For instance in the School view, Student tab > Transcripts > Details, the navkey is student.std.list.trn.detail. However the template context is actually school.student.std.list.trn.detail. There are a number of templates that are scoped to view, but the navkey does not reflect it. Another example is the navkey student.std.list.detail for the Health view is really health.student.std.list.detail. Create filters in the template list where the context begins with "school" or where name contains "pop-up" or "wizard". By creating these filters, it makes it easier for a district to find specific templates that don't have a navkey displayed in Aspen.