Master Templates

The inheritance mechanism described in Inheritance in Widget Framework provides a useful means of re-using groups of widgets. It only works, however, for whole areas. You can, for example, re-use the whole of a template's Main area creating a child template with an empty Main area. But what if you only want to re-use one particular group of widgets, not the whole area? What if you want to re-use a group of widgets from a template other than the parent of the template you are working on? Master templates provide a more flexible means of re-using groups of widgets that solve these problems.

A master templates has a name of the form:

config.master.master-template-name

and contains a set of templates that you want to be able to re-use. You might, for example, create a menu that you want to re-use in many of your templates.

Once you have created a master template containing the widgets you want (let's call it config.master.menu), you can use it by creating a master widget and placing it in any section and/or article templates you like. A master widget has two required properties:

Title

The name of the widget instance you have created. You might set this to Menu.

Master section unique name

The name of the master template this widget is to reference. You would set this to config.master.menu in this case.

Set these properties, save the widget, and then drag it into the templates where you want to use the widget group defined in the master template.

Let us discuss inheritance of master section with an elaborated example

       config.master
         - config.master.master1
           - config.master.master2
      

If master widget is asked to fetch items from config.master.master2 then the framework will look for items in the following order :

1. config.master.master2

2. config.master.master1

3. config.master

So we will move upwards in the config section hierarchy until we find config.master. config section will never be consulted unless you are using inherits_from option

If the config section structure is instead the following :

         config.master
           - config.master.master1
           - config.master.master2
       

IF master widget is asked to fetch items from config.master.master2, then the framework will look for items in the following order :

1. config.master.master2

2. config.master

For detailed instructions on how to create, configure and use widgets, see Widgets.