What makes a Page Template "template-less?" (data publishing with multiple regions)

Question

As of Tridion Sites 9.5 we can use data publishing where Pages and Components are published using built-in (JSON) data.

Editors don't necessarily need to create Component Presentations for a page, they can skip the Component Template selection. For Pages, however, I understand we still need a Page Template selection, but apparently the Page Template can/should be empty per the Documentation.

To be sure, what makes a Page Template output the built-in JSON?

Do all Page Templates have this behavior, or it based on (Page or just Schema) settings or perhaps the lack of Template Building Blocks?

Ultimately, I want to confirm you can have different sets of (Page) Region Schemas that editors select from the Page Template drop-down. But I want to confirm the technical steps to make this work.

Can you create an empty Page Template and simply copy it for each Page Schema you want to offer editors? Then you would link each Page Template to its corresponding Page Schema?

Answer 1

According to https://docs.rws.com/816112/816514/sdl-tridion-sites-9-5-main-documentation/templateless--data-only-publishing - the templateless, data-only publishing does not require TBB functionality.

Therefore, yes I would assume you can create multiple empty Page Templates simply for the purpose of linking to a specific Page Schema.

Answer 2

Yeah, when introducing Page Regions (I'm talking 10 years ago or so when we started on Page Regions support), we thought it would be most convenient to link to a Page Schema through a Page Template (we already had the concept of Page Templates which could be inherited from the Structure Groups and all).

We have even considered letting the Page Template acts as the Page Schema too. Fortunately we didn't take the integration that far, but even the current setup is a bit annoying if you want to go templateless; you still need Page Templates if only to be able to link to Page Schemas.

Note that the JSON generated by the data pipeline is in a completely separated stream. You could combine the two so that rendering a Page/Component produces both HTML (through templating) and JSON (through data pipeline). However, more likely you can let the templating part do nothing and only let the data pipeline render JSON.