What is a User Interface template?

User Interface (UI) templates control the look and feel of a Web page. UI templates can be applied to either pages or database portlets. By applying a template, you can automatically specify a page title, a title background, links to home and help pages, and background colors and images.

UI templates are good for standardizing the overall look and feel of many pages, or for standardizing groups of database portlets in a provider . For example, you can design a UI template for a provider that includes the company logo in the heading, the name of the company in the title, and a common background image. By ensuring every database portlet in the provider uses the same UI template, you impose a standard appearance.

UI template types

You can create these types of UI templates:

Structured UI templates are created using a wizard. In the wizard, you specify images, text, and layout elements that are applied to every database portlet that uses the template. Structured templates may only be applied to database portlets.
Unstructured UI templates are based on HTML code that you supply. To create an unstructured UI template, you first write HTML code to create a Web page. You can also copy this code into Oracle Portal from another source such as another Web page editor.

You then edit the code to add substitution tags to the HTML. When the HTML code executes, the substitution tags embed database portlets, titles and other elements into the Web page. For example, you can add a #BODY# tag that adds a database portlet such as a chart or report to the original Web page background.

Because you are writing your own HTML code, you can create a more elaborate and sophisticated unstructured template than you could if you created an structured template.

Only unstructured templates may be applied to pages.

Note: Your HTML can use <ORACLE> </ORACLE> tags to include SQL statements or PL/SQL blocks in your unstructured template. You can also include HEAD elements such as custom JavaScript, cascading style sheet references, and META tags. Special substitution tags can be used to integrate page metadata to embed PL/SQL scripting.