Once again, the main goal is to reduce time and effort to make a new dashboard. The dashboard template files were build to avoid adding always the same content (Navigation bar, javascript libraries, layout, etc) to all the dashboards templates files and allow different layouts. Another objective that was accomplished with this solution was to avoid the creation of a template file for all the solution folders by using a default tempalte. Finally, but not less important, all the libraries present in the template are dynamically added by the Dashbaord.jsp reducing the size and computation of the templates.
The templates are present in the pentaho-solutions dir under sysyem/pentaho-cdf
There are a few types of template files, used by CDF framework:
Two questions are raised here:
How can we choose between the template-dashboard-mantle and the template-dashboard?
The answer is simple: just use the style tag in the xcdf file or call RenderHTML with
the template request argument.(example: template=mantle). For xcdf files the default template
to be used is specified in solutions/system/pentaho-cdf/plugin.xml.
Can I modify the templates?
Of course, that's the purpose of template files.