Therefore I added a little option to the INCLUDE statement:

1. form="append" appends form data at the end of the topic body
2. form="insert" renders the form data in front ot the topic body

The change was minimal, see the diff to the AthensRelease below:

-- PeterKlausner 7.Aug.02

After using this for quite a few includes, I changed the default behaviour. My reasoning goes like this:

1. You define a form, if you want to make really sure, that some element is there
2. If it must be there, it is probably as important as the free text
3. Therefore, most of the times, you want to see it
4. Therefore, it is more convenient to show it by default
5. In the flow of the other text, it probably makes more sense, to kind of "introduce" the included text with the form as preamble.

The set of options to %INCLUDE now is:

form="insert"

show form data in front of free text, this is the default

form="append"

append at end of free text

form="off"

do not show form data

-- PeterKlausner 12.Aug.02

Has anybody checked this against the current Bejing prerelease? If it still works, then it should be put in Beijing if there is still time (probably not at this date) or forwarded to Cairo release since the code work has aleady been done, and just the doc work needs to be done. I will hopefully be updating the the current beta this week, and may be able to check it at that time.

-- JohnRouillard - 11 Jan 2003

Something like this change makes sense. But, given that the classic template puts form data at the end of a topic shouldn't that be the default? Also it is worth noting that a topic can define which parts are included using %STARTINCLUDE% and %STOPINCLUDE%. If this topic has a form then I would think by default the form should not be rendered by an %INCLUDE%.

-- JohnTalintyre - 30 Sep 2003

While I would like to have more control on where the form goes on a per page basis, I think this change is somewhat unintuitive. We have the following controls for include: %STARTINCLUDE% and %STOPINCLUDE%. Both operate on the text; it is not possible to designate the form to be included or not. However,

• You could say that if you don't have a %STOPINCLUDE% then the inclusion extends also to the form, but that assumes that the form is at the bottom.
• You could also argue that the proposed parameter to %INCLUDE% talks about everything, text and form, and that the above controls only talk about text.

But then, what about the other meta data? I can stick all kinds of information into meta data, which currently is not copied over (and might have to be integrated in some clever way with the including page, in case there is overlap, e.g., the form or tables in metadata, etc.

-- ThomasWeigert - 07 Feb 2004