Skinning will help fiddle with colors, fonts, decoration etc. but most of it is in-situ: it does not really change the position, ordering or structure of the pages. To achieve the latter, more dramatic action is required, of which the template based approach described above is an example. I would still hope that even under the different ‘flavors’ the number of ‘page patterns’ is limited. So each layout flavor comes with just one to five or so page designs/structures for various types of pages (search, results, edit, master-detail,…). So the number of templates should be much smaller than the number of pages since each page falls into one of only a few layout-categories.

Dynamically manipulating the template itself is an interesting option – although that seems to merely relocate the issue: handling multiple variants of a template, only now in run-time code instead of design time templates. I am not sure that makes things easier. It does sound a lot like what Customization should be able to do for us by the way. MDS can hold various editions of any XML file, presumably including templates. So that should be a way to implement the ‘apply appropriate customization at run time’. I have not tried out to manipulate the template itself – it feels more difficult than maintaining several templates manually.

With MDS based customization you by and large create multiple flavors of a single XML file, leaving the application of the appropriate file to the run time MDS framework. You create the various flavors more or less in the same way as you would create the original file. Not sure whether the XSLT based approach would be easier for non-ADF skilled designers. To manipulate the template – either in the visual editor or through XSLT – you still need to understand the basic ADF layout (container) components. You do not manipulate XHTML that is produced by the template but the template – an ADF page – itself.

best regards, Lucas