It would be nice to expand the functionality of the %STARTINCLUDE% and %STOPINCLUDE% to allow demarcation of multiple sections within one topic for inclusion in other topics. I'm kind of surprised this has not been discussed before. The closest I'm found was part of a discussion in ConditionalRendering. There, EdgarBrown says:

...the basic functionality that I would like to have is the capability to decide which part of a topic gets included in another one.

I might have (as I actually do) a description of known bugs that apply to two or three different topics, and I would like to have a single place to update it (something that is easily done with the current %STARTINCLUDE% %STOPINCLUDE% directives), but what happens if we want different parts of the same file to be included in different topics?.

A way to do this would be to extend the %STARTINCLUDE% and %INCLUDE{}% syntax to contain section numbers or names i.e.

In the source topic

% STARTINCLUDE{section="bugs"}%

 .....

% STARTINCLUDE{section="moreBugs"}%

 .....

% STARTINCLUDE{section="funnyStuff"}%

 ....

% ENDINCLUDE{section="bugs,funnyStuff"}%

 ....

% ENDINCLUDE%

It seems to me something along these lines would be extremely useful and not terrible hard to implement. Maybe someone more familiar with the code could comment...

-- LynnwoodBrown - 11 Aug 2002

Lynnwood said: "I'm kind of surprised this has not been discussed before."

I'm surprised that it wasn't discussed here either. This is a wonderful and important idea. I did a search before filing an enhancement request and this one note from 4 years back is all I founbd. Egad!

VickiBrown - 20 Nov 2006

This has not been discussed further because it has been implemented in a slightly different way, using STARTSECTION{"section_name"} and ENDSECTION. See TWikiVariables.

-- ArthurClemens - 20 Nov 2006