Business feature templates enable you to create a template to use as the basis for a project and all of its logic. Business feature templates present a simple, straightforward way to define project logic, where you can plug in the elements that you need within the logic.
For example, you want to build project logic without any concrete screen element, such as to present a callout when a certain button is clicked. You know what callout to display and that you want to relate to the Click method of a button. However, you do not know which particular button to click. In this case, you can create a business feature template that contains an abstract parameter for the button. This abstract parameter acts like a placeholder for the button element. Once you have defined the logic for the template, you only need to assign the placeholder button element with an argument for an actual concrete button when you go to use the template.
For details about the hooks that can be used in conjunction with business feature templates, refer to Configuration for Hook Creation.
Some project-related functionality is not available in a business feature template. For example, the Run Real-Time and Generate project options are not available, and screen elements cannot be captured in a business feature template.
The parameters of the template are initialized in the following way:
Primitives: Initialized by value. The value of the source (the object in the consuming project) is passed to target (the affected object in the template project). In this case, if the source is changed in the consuming project, the target is not affected.
Composite business entities and components:
When the source is destroyed, the parameter still holds a reference to the object to which it was assigned. The relationship between the source and target remains for all runtime executions. Therefore, if the value for the source object is changed in the consuming project, then it is also changed in the template project (target) too.
As of release 4.8 UP5, the following apply to business feature templates:
A constant template parameter argument can be filled in.
The option to select a primitive business entity instance as a parameter argument has been disabled.
To initialize the parameter when the source object is created (for a business entity) or when it is not a dummy/placeholder (for a physical object), support was added on the server side so that the parameter is populated only when the source is initialized or the source business entity is first used.
You can perform the following operations using a business feature template: