Before you can fully understand the usage of the Publisher, you must first understand what a template is used for. The process of data driven communications is driven by two main components. One component is a well structured and refined data source, and the other is a template that will use the data to populate the template at runtime. Let's take an example to further demonstrate.

 

Imagine that you have two customers: John and Jane.

 

When you want to generate your invoices to send for payment collection, you can produce two invoices, one for John and one for Jane. However, we will have one template that will be used with each data source and will produce two entirely different invoices.

 

A template contains both static content and dynamic content. Dynamic content is in the form of placeholders known as fields located in your template. At production time, these fields are replaced by the actual data. The Publisher allows you to not only include these placeholders with a few simple steps, but also to apply complex formatting options and much more in order to create stunning outputs. Here is an example of a template and its associated output. Notice that, in the template that there are fields which indicate where specific data will be inserted. In Figure 2, you can see that the fields are populated with the actual data to produce the output PDF.

 

 

Figure 2: The result of rendering data with template is a PDF in this example.