Template Best Practices¶

These practices keep templates easy to find, and keep the checks they create trustworthy as the templates change.

Decide on the Lock Before You Apply the Template¶

Locked and Unlocked lead to very different maintenance:

Lock a template when the rule must be identical everywhere, such as a regulatory or contractual rule. One edit then updates every linked check.
Leave it unlocked when the template is only a starting point, and each team is expected to tune its own check.

Changing your mind later is possible, but costly in one direction: the save that locks a template with checks copies its definition to every linked check, overwriting whatever each check had changed. See Locked and Unlocked Templates.

Write the Description for the Checks¶

On a locked template, the description is copied to every linked check, and it is what people read on each check and its anomalies. Write it about the rule and its business reason, not about the template itself. Leave table and field names out, since they change from one check to the next.

Use Tags to Group Templates and Their Checks¶

Tags always reach the linked checks, locked or unlocked. A tag such as customer-data or regulatory on a template lets you filter every check built from it, and tag weights raise or lower the Importance of all those checks at once.

Prefer `each()` Over Copies of the Same Template¶

When a rule differs only by one value, such as a country or a region, one template with each() in its filter is easier to maintain than one template per value. New values become new checks with a single edit. See Filter Permutations.

Review Checks Created in Bulk Before They Run¶

Multiple Checks creates every check as Draft. Open the template's Checks tab, review the drafts on their tables, and activate them once they are right, so a mistake in one target does not produce anomalies across many datastores.

Validate Edits Against the Linked Checks¶

An edit to a locked template is applied to all its checks or to none. Before a large change, check the template's Checks tab for checks whose table or field may not accept it, such as a filter that names a column missing from one table. If the edit is refused, the message lists the checks that blocked it.

Keep the Library Clean¶

Archive templates nobody applies anymore. On an unlocked template, archiving unlinks its checks, which keep running as they are. A locked template with checks cannot be archived, so decide first whether those checks should keep the rule. See Archive a Template.