Templates - Novell IDENTITY MANAGER 3.6.1 - MANUAL TASK SERVICE DRIVER Implementation Manual

Both the Subscriber channel and the Publisher channel of the Manual Task Service driver use
templates to create documents. The Subscriber channel creates e-mail messages and the Publisher
channel creates Web pages and XDS documents.
The dynamic portion of a document is supplied via replacement data. Replacement data on the
Subscriber channel is supplied by the Subscriber channel policies, such as the Command
Transformation policy. Replacement data on the Publisher channel is supplied by HTTP data to the
Web server (both URL data and HTTP POST data). The Manual Task Service driver can
automatically supply certain data known to the Manual Task Service driver, such as the Web server
address.
The templates are processed by XSLT style sheets. These template-processing style sheets are
separate from style sheets used as policies in the Subscriber or Publisher channels.
The replacement data is supplied as a parameter to the XSLT style sheet. The output of the style
sheet processing is an XML, HTML, or text document that is used as the body of an e-mail message,
as a Web page, or as a submission to Identity Manager on the Publisher channel.
Replacement data is passed from the Subscriber channel to the Publisher channel via a URL in the e-
mail message. The URL contains a query portion that contains the replacement data items.
The Manual Task Service driver ships with predefined style sheets sufficient to process templates in
order to create e-mail documents, HTML documents, and XDS documents. Other custom style
sheets can be written to provide additional processing options.
An advanced method of creating documents is also available, which uses only an XSLT style sheet
and replacement data. No template is involved. However, this guide assumes the template method is
used because the template method is easier to configure and maintain without XSLT programming
knowledge.

1.3 Templates

Templates are XML documents that are processed by a style sheet in order to generate an output
document. The output document can be XML, HTML, or plain text (or anything else that can be
generated through XSLT).
Templates are used in the Manual Task Service driver to generate e-mail message text on the
Subscriber channel, and to generate dynamic Web pages and XDS documents on the Publisher
channel.
Templates contain text, elements, and replacement tokens. Replacement tokens are replaced in the
output document by data supplied to the style sheet processing the template.
Several examples of templates for various purposes follow. In the examples, the replacement tokens
are the character strings that are between two $ characters.
Templates can also contain action elements. Action elements are control elements interpreted by the
template-processing style sheet. Action elements are described in Appendix D, "Template Action
Elements," on page 49.
The following example template is used to generate an HTML e-mail message body:
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