Web page templates are XML documents containing boilerplate and replacement tokens. Web page templates are used to generate Web page documents (typically HTML documents). See Templates for general information about templates.
Replacement tokens in Web page templates dictate what replacement data is supplied as URL query data on the Subscriber channel. Replacement data on the Publisher channel is obtained from the URL query string for HTTP GET requests and from the URL query string and the POST data for HTTP POST requests.
As an example of the flow of replacement data from the Subscriber channel to the e-mail message and then to the Publisher channel Web server, consider the following scenario:
The Manual Task Service driver is configured so that a new employee's manager is asked to assign a room number to the new employee. The trigger for the e-mail to the manager is the <add> command for a new User object that is processed by the Subscriber channel Command Transformation policy.
When the manager clicks a URL in the e-mail message, a Web page is displayed in the manager's Web browser. The Web page must indicate for whom the manager is entering a room number.
To accomplish this, the <url-query> element on the Subscriber channel contains a replacement data item that identifies the new user by name:
<item name="subject-name">Joe the Intern</item>
This causes the URL query string to contain (among other things) “subject-name=Joe%20the%20Intern”. The “%20” is a URL-encoded space.
The manager's Web browser submits the URL to the Publisher channel Web server when the manager clicks the URL in the e-mail message. The Web server constructs a replacement data item named subject-name with the value Joe the Intern.
The Web page template also specified by the URL contains a replacement token $subject-name$. When the Web page template is processed by the style sheet to construct the Web page, the replacement token is replaced by Joe the Intern, which customizes the Web page for the employee whose User object creation caused the e-mail to be sent.
For additional information on a complete Subscriber-channel-to-Publisher-channel transaction, see Section F.0, Data Flow Scenario for a New Employee.