Document Templates
A document template is an ordinary ROPARC document that lives in the Explorer’s Templates area instead of the workspace. It belongs to whatever workarea wrote it, is edited with the normal document editor, and keeps its own history. Other documents are then created from it, and can later be upgraded when the template moves on.
Templates are how a systems engineering organisation makes every System Requirements Specification, test plan or safety case start from the same skeleton, carry the same boilerplate and show the same fields — without copy-pasting a “template project” and watching the copies drift apart.
The Templates area
The Explorer sidebar has two areas: the Workspace tree of documents and dashboards, and below it Templates. Templates are created and managed there, in folders of their own:
- New template (the area’s + menu, or a template folder’s menu) creates an empty template of the chosen document type.
- Save as template… on a workspace document — from its row menu, or from Properties → Template — copies the document into the Templates area as a new template. The copy owns every item; its headings are the default anchors. The original is left as it is and does not follow the new template.
- Templates from other workareas that this workarea may use appear under From other workareas, read-only, each with New from template….
The two areas never mix: a template cannot be placed in a workspace folder, and an ordinary document cannot be placed in a templates folder. Unmarking a template moves it back to the workspace root. Change requests never touch templates — they are edited on main only, while documents created from them stay editable in a change request.
Where templates come from
Which templates a workarea may use is configuration, not location. Each tier of the configuration hierarchy lists template source workareas under Document Templates:
| Tier | Managed at | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Global | Administration → Site → Global Configuration | every workarea on the site may use templates from these workareas |
| Workarea group | Administration → Site → Workarea Groups | every workarea in the group may |
| Workarea | Settings → Document Templates | this workarea only |
Sources merge additively down the hierarchy, and a workarea is always a source for itself. Nothing is copied or moved between workareas: listing a workarea as a source lets the workareas below read its template documents (and only those), so a group’s Standards workarea can hold the group’s templates while its members keep full control of them.
Anchors and seeds
When a document is a template you decide, per section, what it becomes in the documents created from it:
- Anchor — stays owned by the template. Consuming documents show it as a read-only reference bound to the template revision they follow. Use anchors for the heading skeleton and for boilerplate text that must read the same everywhere.
- Seed — copied once. The copy is a new item owned by the consuming document; authors edit it freely. Use seeds for starter content.
Headings default to anchors and everything else to seeds; change either in Properties → Template → Edit anchors.
Anchors show a From template badge in the editor and cannot be edited there. To deviate, copy the anchor into the document, which turns it into an ordinary item of your own.
Revisions
A template has approved revisions: labelled points on its history (v1, v2, …) made from Properties → Template → Approve revision. Work on the next revision continues on the template as usual; documents created from it follow the approved revision you picked, by default the newest.
A document created from a template records the template and the revision it follows. The properties panel shows both, and tells you when a newer revision has been approved.
Creating a document from a template
In the Explorer sidebar choose New document → New from template… (at the root or in a folder), or New from template… on a template under From other workareas. Pick the template and revision, review the preview — how many anchors and seeds, and whether every item type the template uses exists in your workarea — give the document a title and create it.
The new document gets the template’s document type, description, layout settings, its anchors pinned to the chosen revision, and a copy of every seed.
Upgrading
When a newer revision is approved, open Properties → Template → Compare & upgrade. The comparison shows:
- anchors the new revision added, removed or changed;
- seeds: which of your copies are untouched (they will be refreshed), which you have changed (they are kept), and which the template added (they are copied in);
- layout settings the template changed, kept where you deviated locally.
Upgrading rewrites the document in one commit. Your own items keep their place under the anchor they sat under; a removed anchor hands its items to the anchor before it. Existing baselines are never touched.
Detach stops following the template altogether: anchors become the document’s own copies.
Template management
Templates are organised in the Templates area’s own folders — create, rename, move and delete them as in the workspace, within that area. From a template’s own properties panel you can choose its anchors, approve revisions, see every document that follows it in any workarea you can access, and upgrade all of them at once. A template that documents still follow cannot be deleted or unmarked — detach the followers first.
Creating or upgrading is refused when the template uses an item type, or a document type, that does not exist in the target workarea. Fields the layout names that the target type lacks are only warned about.