There is a need to provide a "holding tank" of information that can later be applied to a proposal. The information in the holding tank may be incomplete and result from running a tool. Furthermore, these fragments of information may be usefully applied in several places of a proposal, where they can be further specified. For example, a user might be in the Visual Target Tuner and see an orient of possible interest for an exposure. It would be useful to have a place to store these partial results as a potential visit/exposure. The desired orient might be applied to several visits. Templates provide this capability.
A template has the structure of a record in a spreadsheet view of a proposal. There are templates corresponding to targets, visits, and exposures. Templates store values obtained from tools, but do not have any immediate effect on a proposal. A user in a tool such as the Visual Target Tuner can elect to store results in a target, visit, and/or exposure templates. The templates can be edited as in the case of spreadsheets. To apply a template to a proposal, a user copies (in automated manner, by say dragging the template) to a proposal spreadsheet or tree.
Another possible use of templates is for easing the transfer of the information from the Phase 1 proposal for use in developing a Phase 2 proposal. Partially filled out target and exposure templates will be provided for that purpose.