What is an object template?

Note: Microsoft Office Word is required for creating and modifying object templates.

Object templates control the content and format when you export Teamcenter objects to Word. Object templates are Word documents that:

• Use property keywords to define which properties of the selected objects are exported.
  • Caution: do not use property keywords in the Word content of requirement, paragraph, or block objects — keywords in object content (e.g. {%body_text}) cause an infinite loop in the export process, and error messages are not displayed.
  • In an object template intended for export to the Live integration with Word output mode, the {%object_name} property keyword is required; otherwise structure data cannot be edited in live Word. Properties with dynamic or cascading lists of values (LOVs) cannot be modified with live Word.
• Specify the format of the exported property information (e.g. tabular format).
• Specify static text to be included in the export document.
• Can specify content rules that determine which objects are exported to the output document.
• Can be associated with specific business object types using item revision definition configuration (IRDC).
• Can be selected manually when you export data.
• Can be viewed and edited in Word or in the Teamcenter embedded viewer.

Caution: Modify Word styles only in the template. Style modification through Word's associated XML files can corrupt the template and its output documents.

In export documents based on the default object template, Word's Normal style can overwrite styles applied to object content. Workaround in the default object template:

1. Add a dummy paragraph, and apply the overwritten style to the dummy.
2. Save the changes.
3. Delete the dummy paragraph, then save and close the template.

Object Template items and Object Template Revision item revisions contain datasets of the FullText subclass. Full Text datasets represent Word content by named references to XML files.

Related Topics

• Property name syntax in specification templates and object templates
• Content rule for specification templates and object templates