Templates

Overview

A template is a saved definition of something you create repeatedly. Pick it in a composer and the fields arrive already filled in: the title, the properties, the starting document, and — for project templates — the milestones and issues that always come with that kind of work.

Templates in Pulse are one platform with three entry points. An issue template, a project template, and a request template share the same authoring screens, the same visibility rules, the same defaults, and the same behaviour when something a template names no longer exists. What differs is the entity each one creates, and the properties that entity has.

What a template decides

Every template answers four questions, and each one is a separate choice you make while authoring.

A template's target is fixed at creation. A request template always creates a request and never an issue, which is why the intake a team publishes cannot quietly turn into something else.

Standard and Form

Templates come in two modes.

Form mode is available for issue and request templates. Project templates are standard only, because the thing that makes them valuable — the milestones and issues they create — is already a fixed structure rather than a question.

Visibility

A template is visible either to the whole workspace or to exactly one team.

• Everyone in the workspace. Offered in every team's composer. Use it for work that looks the same wherever it is filed.
• One team. Offered only in that team. Sub-teams do not inherit it, so a child team's intake never appears in its parent's composer.

There is no third level and no inheritance chain. What a composer offers is the workspace's templates plus the direct team's, and nothing else — which is why the answer to "why can I not see this template" is always either the wrong team or the wrong target.

Workspace-scoped templates can only be created and edited by workspace admins. A workspace template changes what every team is shown, so team managers author team templates only.

Where templates live

Templates are managed in settings, in the section of the entity they create.

Each list shows the templates offered in that context, grouped by visibility: the workspace's first, then each team's. Every row has a … menu: edit, duplicate, copy a direct link, and delete. You only see the entries your permissions allow, so someone who can use a template but not author it still gets its link.

A team page merges all three targets into one screen, matching where a team manager actually works. It is the same list and the same editor, filtered to that team.

Using a template

There are three ways to start something from a template, and all three end in the same composer.

A direct link is a preselection, not permission. Someone who cannot use the template in that team gets an empty composer rather than a template they are not allowed to apply, and the review step is shown either way — following a link never skips past what the template is about to do.

If you have already typed something when you apply a template, Pulse asks before overwriting: keep what you wrote and let the template fill only the empty fields, or take the template's values instead.

When a template no longer fits

Templates name real things — a team's labels, a project, an assignee, a milestone — and those things get deleted, renamed, or moved. Pulse re-checks every reference at the moment you apply the template, against the team you are creating in, and reports what it found instead of silently producing a broken draft.

A value that does not fit is handled in one of two ways, and both are reported:

• Removed. The reference was checked and failed. It is left out of the draft, and the composer names it before you create.
• Flagged. The check itself could not run. The value is kept and marked unverified, so a temporary outage does not look like lost data.

The reasons Pulse reports:

None of this blocks creation. The only thing that does is an unanswered required question in a form.

Because references are resolved against the destination, the same template can produce different drafts in two teams. That is not a bug to work around — it is how a workspace template stays usable in a team that does not have the other team's labels.

Revisions and attribution

Editing what a template produces — its definition, name, description, or icon — mints a new revision, and Pulse keeps the full snapshot rather than a diff. Changing only who can see it does not. When work is created from a template, the record stores which template and which revision it came from.

Three things follow from that:

• A template's use count is real usage, recorded when the entity is created rather than when someone opens the picker.
• Deleting a template stops it being offered from now on. Work already created from it is unchanged, and still shows the template and revision it came from.
• Rewriting a template does not rewrite history. Work created six weeks ago still points at the revision that actually produced it.

Default templates

A team can name the template a composer opens with, so the common case needs no choice at all. Defaults are set per team and per target. There is no workspace default that a team inherits: a team that has configured nothing gets an empty composer, and never a preselection nobody set.

Issue defaults are resolved separately for two audiences — people who belong to the destination team, and people who do not. A form template can only be the default for non-members, because a form asks questions inside the composer a member works in all day.

Requests go one step further. Besides a default template, a team can require that every request start from one. See Request templates.

Permissions

Applying a template carries no extra authority. It fills in a composer, and the entity it produces is created under the same permission any other issue, project, or request needs.

Moving a template between the workspace and a team needs authority over both sides, so a team manager cannot promote their own team's template into every other team's composer.

Limits

Next

• Issue templates
• Project templates
• Request templates
• Requests