What we just did, grabbing any one of our background elements without thinking about it, could get us into a little trouble later on, because Z-Order is really important for background elements. 

What we should do first is to get a record of the Z-Order of the controls and background elements, so we can make sure that when we move them to the Master Template, we can get them into the right Z-Order again.

What we just did, by arbitrarily selecting one element and moving it to the Master Template before any other elements, was to place this element behind any other elements that we move to the Master Template.  This could have an undesirable effect on the appearance of our layout.

Fortunately, it's very easy to get a record of the Z-Order of all the controls and background elements on our index page, before we make any further changes.  We just print out an Item List Report: click menu item Reports | Item List, and print the report when it comes up.

The items are listed in Z-Order, with the items farthest in the background (i.e., drawn first) at the top of the list, and the item in the foreground (i.e., drawn last, on top of everything else) is the last item of the list.

Here is the list of controls as it appears right now in our project, copied from the Item List Report at this stage of our work:

**************************************************
         Master Page Template
         ====================

  Name=Master Class=Pg Id=<template>
    Control: name=Al1 Class=Al Id=al1
**************************************************

 

  Page: name=Index Class=Pg Id=index
    Control: name=Gb1 Class=Gb Id=gb1
    Control: name=Ac1 Class=Ac Id=ac1
    Control: name=Tx1 Class=Tx Id=tx1
    Control: name=Tx2 Class=Tx Id=tx2
    Control: name=Tx3 Class=Tx Id=tx3
    Control: name=Pl1 Class=Pl Id=pl1
    Control: name=Pb1 Class=Pb Id=pb1
    Control: name=Pb2 Class=Pb Id=pb2
    Control: name=Pb3 Class=Pb Id=pb3
    Control: name=Pb5 Class=Pb Id=pb5
    Control: name=Pb4 Class=Pb Id=pb4
    Control: name=Al2 Class=Al Id=al2
    Control: name=Tx4 Class=Tx Id=tx4
    Control: name=Ld2 Class=Ld Id=ld2
    Control: name=Ld4 Class=Ld Id=ld4
    Control: name=Ld3 Class=Ld Id=ld3
    Control: name=Hg1 Class=Hg Id=hg1
    Control: name=Px1 Class=Px Id=px1
    Control: name=Tx5 Class=Tx Id=tx5
    Control: name=Tx7 Class=Tx Id=tx7
    Control: name=Tx9 Class=Tx Id=tx9
    Control: name=Ld1 Class=Ld Id=ld1

Note that background element named Al1 (Id =al1) has already been copied to the Master Template, but we still see the Z-Order of all the other items on the index page, so we can move things to the Master Template, and fix their Z-Order at the end, using the Z-Order dialog, if necessary.

It probably will be necessary to adjust the Z-Order after we copy all the background elements, because some of them will be behind other elements, and could be hard to select until we move some other elements out of the way first.