One of the best things about templates is how portable they are. You can build a template for a particular piece of presentation and then use that template everywhere you need it. In fact you can have several templates to choose from, giving you themes and different ways of displaying the same data.
This is a very powerful and very maintainable technique. Portable template files are a great example of the Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) principal and are a good idea for any template that will see reuse.
The new DataView control in the latest beta of the Microsoft Ajax Library version 4.0 (aka the ASP.NET AJAX Library) has a fine template engine built into it. Unfortunately, those templates must be embedded in the page markup. If it’s your project then you can simply use an ascx User Control, or a ContentPlaceHolder or an Html.RenderPartial, but what if you need to be able to use the template on a static file, or a clients site, or even in another framework? You can’t have portable template files that you can just call anywhere. Well, you can, but you have to use a workaround technique.
This is one technique that I came up with for importing a template file into a page. This lets me have one (or a selection of) template files that I can use everywhere for a portable JavaScript widget. It has no dependencies other than the Microsoft Ajax Library.
