Quick Facts on Organizing your content via display templates

Hello SharePointer,

Display templates are most coolest feature to express the content in your dashboard or pages.Following are the quick points to understand what and how display templates comes with magical view:

Display Template Use: It is used in search results web that uses search service and displays the contents like documents, pages, images, blog posts, tasks based on query specified in web part configuration settings.

What it controls: display and look&feel of content received via search result.

Display template creation: It contains two files 1) HTML 2) JS in which only HTML is recommended to edit via any HTML editor. These files are located under Master Page Gallery.In order to create display template,just copy the item template and rename it in Master Page gallery.After refreshing It will populate with js file associated with your new template which is not recommended to edit at all.You require to work and modify html file as per your display need.

Display Template Types: There are two types of display templates:

1) Control Template – Responsible for overall structure of the results ( e.g. List, List with paging, slideshow)
2) Item Template – Responsible for each item’s structure.(e.g. Two lines,Video,Large Picture, Picture on left – 3 lines on right, Picture on top – 3 lines on bottom)
Combined HTML output of a control display template and item display template

Filtration: Results can be filter as per the content type, author, file extensions, languages, and managed properties and site URL. It also gives you facility to group the search results.

Limitations:
1) Display template allows only 50 items per page in the web part.
2) New items will be render based on search crawling schedule.

3) If you are concentrating to display only pages, then they must be published.

Conclusion: Display templates are HTML and JavaScript rather than XSL which are configured for the Site and Site Collection and display the content based on applied rules and logic. Display Templates are used for Results of all kinds, search results, content by search results, and refiners.

I will come up next with different uses of display tempalte to visualize your site content via search technology 🙂

Happy Share-pointing,
Stay Gifted,Stay Young !