Creating New Team Templates

See Also

Team templates make it easy to share and distribute the team solutions you create. For example, an expense-reporting solution created for your main office could be distributed as a template to branch officers. Then, each branch could create instances of the solution as-is or modify it as required.

Each team template contains all of the information required to create a complete team solution, including the database schema, workflow rules, lookup tables, forms, and views.

Note    When you create a template, the configuration of the SQL Server where the template is made is stored in the template. If you deploy the template to a server with different configuration settings, a message will warn you of possible issues.

When developing your solution, it is important to keep these configuration issues in mind. Your development server should have the same configuration as your target servers.

To save a solution as a template

1. In the Access Workflow Designer, open the solution you want to save as a template.
   
   
2. From the File menu, select Save as Template to open the Team Template wizard.
   
   
3. Click Next.
   
   
4. Specify a name and title for the new template, and enter version information and a description if desired. This information will be available in the Team Solutions Manager Templates tab.
   
   
5. Specify the main and lookup tables whose data you would like to exclude from the template. By default, any data in the tables is included in the template. By selecting a table on this wizard page, the table schema is still stored in the template, but the data is removed.

   Note   For each main table selected to be included in the template, all associated detail and lookup tables are also included. To exclude the data from specific associated lookup tables, select the box next to the lookup table name.

   Be aware that you cannot include the data from a main table and exclude the data from a lookup table that is related to the main table or one of its detail tables.

6. To include existing solution users in the template, select the Include current users in the new team template option. If this template will be used to create new solutions with different users, you should exclude the current users from the template. The default is to exclude existing users.
   
   
7. Click Finish. The Team Template wizard backs up the solution database, truncates any specified tables, removes database users if desired, and stores the backed-up database information in a template in the template directory. It also enumerates all of the files in your team Web and stores them in the template directory.

   Note   This process may take a few minutes.

Once you have created a template, new instances of the solution can be created from the template using the New Team Solutions wizard. Each new team solution instance will have the same database schema and Web structure as the solution from which the template was created.

Note   Both the Web site and the database must be on the same server. This server must have the Access Workflow Designer server components installed.

After creating the new team solution from the template, you can change the team solution title using the Access Workflow Designer. You cannot change the Web URL or database name once the solution has been created.