9.6  Template Catalogs: for other people to fill in

The use of template catalogs is an advanced option for the creation of catalogs that do not allow class editing. Using this feature you can create a catalog for distribution to other parties so that new records can be added but where they must use the classes exactly as supplied. This can be useful when collecting data from multiple sources. By making the class definitions non-editable, you can ensure that the resulting catalogs can be easily integrated.

To create template catalogs, open the Preferences dialog (Tools>Preferences... on the main menu) then select "Enable controlled editing" in the "Advanced" section, and click "OK".

There should now be an extra menu item on the main "File" menu, "Save as Template...". Any catalog saved using this menu item will no longer allow class editing. Note that this option does not save the current catalog, but creates a new copy, so remember to save in a different location from the current "master" catalog.

Opening this new template catalog will disable any class editing features of Catalyzer. In this mode, you can still create, remove and modify records.

Template catalogs are very useful to help with curation and submission of data - you can create a template catalog containing all the fields which should be filled in, give this to your users, and you can be sure that the filled-in catalogs they return will conform to your format. This is a more powerful alternative to giving out skeleton spreadsheets or documents to data submitters.

You can also use the Required fields feature to ensure that the all the required information is entered into the template catalog.