Templates
- 2 minutes to read
Templates define what Windows and Frames look like. For instance, built-in Templates contain Action Containers and a View site. When you build an application, ready-to-use Templates help you concentrate on the business model and logic, instead of having to create a UI from scratch. If necessary, you can customize the default Templates or replace them with your own.
These topics describe the built-in Template types.
Refer to the following topic to learn how to customize the default Templates:
How It Works
A Template is a control that implements the IFrameTemplate or IWindowTemplate interface. These interfaces provide methods that specify a Template’s Action Containers collection, and assign a View to be displayed.
The IWindowTemplate interface is inherited from the IFrameTemplate interface. The difference is that the IWindowTemplate interface additionally provides a store for status messages, a Template’s caption and a flag indicating whether it should be sizeable. This means that a Template that implements the IWindowTemplate interface behaves like a standard form.
The controls that are used to display List and Detail Views support end-user customization. For instance, in WinForms applications, users can customize the layout of toolbars, columns in grid controls, controls in detail forms, etc. All built-in Windows Forms Templates are designed to save these end-user customizations to the Application Model, so changes made will persist between application runs.