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Templates: How to create your own

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Now that we discussed extensively all about templates, we can talk about how this all this can be put at your service.

You see, we will give you the capability (though not in the Access product itself - details will be forthcoming soon, hopefully) to generate templates out of any database (not ADPs, though). By using a very simple wizard where you simply feed in the preview image, title, description and such, you will create an ACCDT file. 

Additionally, if you work in a corporation, you can use deployment scripts to copy your own company templates into the template store folders. This is a very effective way to deploy your workflow Access applications across your whole organization. This means that you can develop a database, brand it as you will and make it up to spec with your corporate guidance and then simply generate a template that can be deployed throughout your organization using traditional Window group policy mechanisms.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 27, 2006
    Hi Hugh, when you say, "copy your own company templates into the template store folders.", do you mean pictures(jpg's and stuff)
    or actual Access files(mdb, accdb)?
  • Anonymous
    September 28, 2006
    Hi Grovelli,

    Actually, it can work for both ways, even though I am mainly refering to the actual Access template (ACCDT, not really an ACCDB or MDB).

    At first, you can author whatever database you want and brand forms and reports with your company logo, pictures, etc inside the database. From this database, a template will be generated (and ACCDT file).

    Afterwards, you use global policies (or login scripts, whatever you really want) to deploy the ACCDT file to your users. If you want, you can also deploy JPEGs and other stuff alongside the ACCDT to fixed locations on the disk and reference those from the instanciated template. However, it would seem more reasonable to embed as much as you can within the template itself. That is particularly true now that in Access 2007 images are stored without any bloat (JPEGs are really stored as JPEGs and so forth).

    Finally, notice that you will deploy ACCDTs, not really databases. This is good because your users will be able to create as many databases out of those as they want, without spoiling them or requiring you to refresh them (unless you make changes, etc).

    Does that make sense or did I just confuse you some more? :)
  • Anonymous
    September 28, 2006
    Thanks Hugh, crystal clear. :-)
  • Anonymous
    September 28, 2006
    How can we set object templates for our database templates?

    Currently I have a form that has all controls types in all sections, then I set the properties the way I want, create a new AutoFormat from this form and finally set that as the Form template under options. I do the same for reports. While I have no problem doing that for myself as I have the form and report saved in my library and drag them out only when I get a clean machine/ re-image but it would be real nice if we could get these things into the templates themselves.

    Steve
  • Anonymous
    October 03, 2006
    Hi Stevbe, To create a new AutoFormat, you should take a look at this post by Erik: http://blogs.msdn.com/access/archive/2006/06/20/639954.aspx. The autoformat is a per-user setting, so it can't be embedded on templates. Nor does it make a lot of sense to, since you can deploy both separately and they are completly independent.  If you want to deploy these automatically on new machines, you can use a group policy (if you're in an enterprise) or a plain login script (or install login, whenever you want, using plain xcopy or similar) to copy your new autoformat database to this location: %APPDATA%MicrosoftAccessACWZUSR12.accdu Does that answer your question?