createWithTemplate not working with public or brand templates

[Ru Howe, Stornaway.io]

Hi folks,

@ErinF  replied here in September to @JC França about opening a specific brand template where she said:

An engineering team member says this:It is possible to load the Express with a specific template.
createWithTemplate( docConfig: Editor.CreateWithTemplateDocConfig, appConfig?: FirstParty.Editor.EditorAppConfig, exportConfig?: ExportConfig, containerConfig?: ContainerConfig ) : void; 
Let us know if you need any clarification on this.

Yes please, I'd like some help with it!

And @Barranca helped @Pro Imaging LFP. with the issue I'm having with it, in November.
Where Davide provided a Template ID copied from Adobe's own template section.

When I use the templateId that Davide provided for the Adobe template:

urn:aaid:sc:VA6C2:67e8c8d8-f5d0-5277-94a5-17c9b2b9bf25
It works.

But when I use my own published template ID (see URL) for a button image:
urn:aaid:sc:EU:e7ae7e26-ad9e-469c-8a64-5f6afc8209dc
https://new.express.adobe.com/publishedV2/urn:aaid:sc:EU:e7ae7e26-ad9e-469c-8a64-5f6afc8209dc
Which is available publicly.

It does not work.

And when I use my own brand template, which is private just to me (and thus not nearly as useful to us as a public template)

urn:aaid:sc:EU:3ce320d1-b74e-4d47-a184-2155b71bd07b/0952deab-af87-4f8a-9cd7-cc953d21f8c7

This also does not work

I can see that @Pro Imaging LFP found the same thing, but the conversation stopped so I'm re-raising it with my own details.

My Templates are available - in fact, if I load the public template document ID above via the regular edit method, it opens the template in the Embed modal as a read only page - without a remix button - see screenshot. (In fact, just showing the remix button here would be very useful.)
So this published customer template is available to the modal, just not usable - but createWithTemplate doesn't work with it - and doesn't seem to work for anything other than Adobe templates. 

Hopefully the use case for this is obvious: our company needs to make and provide templates to users of our app with useful custom designs - like ready-made buttons or backgrounds with text boxes pre-set.

So that they can just select them, edit a copy of the template in their own library, and save the result back to my app with their own document ID.

It would be great if you could help me get it working.

Or if it's just not available for customer templates, then it would be an important feature request to open that up - it's a much needed feature, which would really unlock a lot of power and flexibility for Express Embed. Not having custom customer templates is a limitation compared to the full version where we can just share public templates.

Thanks,

Ru

[Ru Howe, Stornaway.io]

Update:
Another example for reference:

1) ADOBE TEMPLATE:
Here's a source Adobe video template available via the Express sidebar - I selected it, clicked Customize This button on the template preview modal, then when it opened in the editor I copiied the URL and ID via the Address Bar:
https://new.express.adobe.com/design/template/urn:aaid:sc:VA6C2:f0615ba0-520f-5df2-bc19-5c3656f94754...
urn:aaid:sc:VA6C2:f0615ba0-520f-5df2-bc19-5c3656f94754
NB the URL and location code are specific to Adobe templates.
This ID works OK with the createWithTemplate method but it's not a template I need.

2) CUSTOM TEMPLATE:
Then I clicked Share and chose "Make a template" and chose "Create a Public Template Link".
The link it made is:
https://new.express.adobe.com/publishedV2/urn:aaid:sc:EU:93630bc0-192b-4f20-ab67-b31e63642bec?promoi...
urn:aaid:sc:EU:93630bc0-192b-4f20-ab67-b31e63642bec
This ID does NOT work in the createWithTemplate method - nor do any others that I create myself. 

It fails with

hz-startup-ui-index.…cdb096ba4045e5.js:1 Failed to get document id
_mirrorOriginalConsole @ hz-startup-ui-index.…cdb096ba4045e5.js:1
_logWithLevel @ hz-startup-ui-index.…cdb096ba4045e5.js:1
warn @ hz-startup-ui-index.…cdb096ba4045e5.js:1
setDocumentPreference @ hz-startup-ui-index.…cdb096ba4045e5.js:1

hz-startup-otel.5397…36fee08ea27aa1.js:2 OpenedDocumentNotFoundError: Starter template not found
at _._processTemplateRemixError (hz-authoring-actions…071232c9.js:1:24449)
at _.newDocumentFromTemplate (hz-authoring-actions…071232c9.js:1:23605)
at e.handleNewDocumentFromTemplate [as execute] (hz-authoring-actions…071232c9.js:1:35223)
at x-startup-shared.f7f…d1e6707.js:2:624232

[Synerigst]

I am interested here as well as to what templates can be used for the template id parameter.

[Ru Howe, Stornaway.io]

Hi @Barranca 

I just saw that you replied in the other new thread about templates, to say that createFromTemplate "for the time being, works only for publicly available templates."

I take that as confirmation that what I've reported here is expected behaviour currently?

And I take the positive from 'for the time being' - but could you let me know if there's a plan to open this up to public templates that we make ourselves as described here? If there's no plan to do that, or no plan to do it soon, it would be good to stop us holding our breath.

NB I don't just mean brand templates, just documents turned into Templates and made public as described in my posts here. There's some descriptive confusion here between these which are publicly available templates, and what you've called 'publicly available templates' by which I think you mean Adobe's built-in templates.

[Barranca]

Hi @Ru Howe, Stornaway.io,

you're right in calling out the misunderstanding (that I've contributed to creating!) between publicly available—e.g., built by you as a user, and shared—and Express built-in ones. Only the latter work with createWithTemplate() at the moment.

I can't comment on prioritization, but custom Templates—and Collections, too—have a very clear use case and have been requested before. If anything comes out, I'll report back here for sure.

Thanks!

[Ru Howe, Stornaway.io]

That's great to know – thanks for confirming. I will exhale. If there's any change in this, I'd really appreciate if you could notify us here. is it worth me adding a feature request anywhere else?

Thanks as always for the swift and detailed responses. You all in CC and Express developer support are the best.

[Pro Imaging LFP]

I'm glad you picked this topic back up, @Ru Howe, Stornaway.io .  We are also circling back to this and I had my hopes high that this was resolved.  It seems like such an obvious feature - make your own templates and brand templates and link to them thru Embed in your own web environment.  

@Barranca - do you know if this feature has made the development schedule?