# Creating and Editing Templates

The harness provides users with the optional ability to create and edit templates that can be used to run tests on multiple test systems or test platform.

Your test suite might not enable creating or editing templates. The menu items and features described here will not appear in your user interface if your test suite does not support templates.

For example, if your test suite enables creating and editing templates and your test group uses a central location to provide and manage the resources required to run tests (the test suite, report directories, configuration files, or the harness), you can create a template that contains all known configuration values required by the test group to run tests. Each user can load the template from the central site, provide only those values unique to their test environment or test run, and run their tests using their completed configuration.

See Creating a Template for a detailed description of the process used to create a template.

See Editing a Template for a detailed description of the process used to change the contents of a template.

In addition to providing users with partially completed configurations, templates can further simplify the process of creating and maintaining configurations through the use of the following features:

- Bookmarks
- Propagation

An optional feature of templates is the ability to propagate (inherit) template updates to all configurations based on that template. When the test suite developer enables template propagation, the harness checks for template updates when a user does any of the following:

- Starts a test run.
- Opens a work directory.
- Loads a configuration.

For a configuration to receive template updates, the test suite developer must enable propagation in both the configuration and its template.

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