What is a Lotus Notes Template?
A Lotus Notes template is a skeleton that contains design elements, but generally no documents. When you use a template to create a Lotus Notes database, the template's design elements are copied to the database created from that template.
What are Template files?
A template is any Lotus Notes data file (.NTF or .NSF) that has a value in its Master Template property.
How are templates used?
When you update design elements in a Lotus Notes template, and then refresh (or replace) the design of a Lotus Notes database that inherits from the template, changes that have been made to the template (additions, modifications and deletions) are applied to the database. For example if you add a new form to the template and then refresh (or replace) the design of the database, the new form will be added to the database.
Why use templates?
Lotus Notes templates allow developers to separate the design of a database from the data stored in the database. This means that developers can make modification to the design in the template without interfering with live data in production or QA versions of the database. Templates also allow for the reuse of a single design element (forms, views, script libraries etc) by multiple databases, for example a form from one template may be inherited by several different databases.
Design Inheritance
Lotus Notes provides design inheritance at two levels; Database and Design element.
Database inheritance
A database can inherit all its design elements from a specific template.
In this case, when the database design is refreshed (or replaced), all the design elements in the database will be updated to match the the design elements from the specified template.
Design element inheritance
Individual design elements can inherit from a specific template.
In this case, when the database design is refreshed (or replaced), this particular design element will be refreshed from the template specified in the Inherit from the design template field.
Note that a database can inherit from a Master template (or no template) but any individual design element can inherit from a different template.