Hi I've done exactly the same, it was not really needed for a Dashlet but for to embed the documentlibrary of a site in an iframe for another site.
So what I did was indeed create a new page template embedded-documentlibrary.
I've copied first the following files and renamed them:
- site-data/pages/documentlibrary.xml
- site-data/template-instances/documentlibrary.xml
- site-webscripts/org/alfresco/documentlibrary.ftl
If you rename file 3 or put it in another folder, you need to check the paths in file 1 & 2.
So to make only the documentlibrary appear instead of everyting I just removed everything in file 3 within the <div id="alf-hd">
tag.
If you remove the tag, the document-tree will also be removed and it gave some javascript errors. This should be fixed in the latest version, but haven't tied that.
So it's extremely easy to create your own page and instead of navigating to site/documentlibrary you just navigate to site/embedded-documentlibrary or your own name you've chosen.
And yes then you'll need to use the web-view Dashlet to show it.
The only thing you need to know is, that the links open within the iframe. So if you use the web-view Dashlet, you need to open the links in a new window. For my situation I needed an iframe, in your case you could also just let the freemarker from your Dashlet render the components needed.