I have noticed that dispatch templates have the same “Slots” tab as other types of template, allowing “Available Slots” to be moved into a list of “Contained Slots”.
My question is: Can this be used? I am setting up dispatch templates for each content type, to serve as the default template for that content type on all sites. Can I also centralise the assignment of slots to content types, by specifying all the slots in the dispatch template, not in the page templates for that content type? Seeing as the list of slots presented to the user in the Active Assmebly Table Editor cannot be filtered by site or community, there doesn’t been to be any advantage to only adding slots to the “Contained Slots” list of the page templates that use them in their source code.
The Slots on a Template are used for a couple of functions besides the Table Editor.
For example, they are used in determining how the “TouchParentItem” logic works: snippet templates which have slots are treated differently from those that do not.
In the case of Dispatch templates, it’s what’s defined in the Dispatch Template that governs, not what is in the Target Template.
It works for the Active Assembly Table Editor (aka Related Content Control) but we haven’t experimented with the effect on publishing yet. We don’t have any snippet templates with slots inside them, so that isn’t an issue for us.
It does mean you cannot trace back from a slot to the page template(s) it is used in, but there isn’t a tool for that (you can use some SQL.) We probably think, on balance, that centralising our assignment of slots to one dispatch template per content type is worth it.