Feature Proposal: It should be possible to include topic sections in wiki table cells

Motivation

At the moment the user must take care that line breaks in an included section don't break a wiki table. IMHO this should just work out of the box as it does in XWiki.

Description and Documentation

Examples

See Foswikitask:Item11857 for an example.

Impact

WhatDoesItAffect:

%WHATDOESITAFFECT%

edit

Implementation

-- Contributors: FranzJosefGigler - 15 May 2012

Discussion

There are at least two workarounds for this feature, either use HTML <table> tags, or the <render> tags provided by TWiki:Plugins.RecursiveRenderPlugin. Either solution is clumsy. Are there other workarounds? What about the MediaWikiTablePlugin?

Maybe it's not INCLUDE that should be enhanced but the basic wiki table rendering mechanism. This could have an impact on templates regarding the construction of forms. Now they use HTML table tags all over, because of the problems with line breaks and rendering, if I remember correctly.

-- FranzJosefGigler - 15 May 2012

XWiki can do this easily because they have a very powerful DOM (Document Object Model).

Implementing a DOM isn't easy, help wanted - FoswikiDOM

Possibly related, is Crawford's work on DemandParseTables which should centralize table parsing into a single standardized API in Foswiki.

-- PaulHarvey - 16 May 2012 - 01:19

See my comments at Item11857 why I think that the initial desire is not related to a different kind of of transclusion. Xwiki isn't doing anything special in that respect.

-- MichaelDaum - 16 May 2012

for starters, adding an escape mode to INCLUDE / all markup wouldn't be too hard - and then making its use automatic based on context - where intable needs to be such a context, might be possible.

I'm thinking that we don't need to tinker with the evaluation order, and suspect that with Crawford's table parsing code, we could wire that up for the most typical cases.

That said SEARCH{format="| | | $percntINCLUDE...|" will be very 'interesting' to detect - for not quite impossible values of interesting'

-- SvenDowideit - 16 May 2012

I'd never propose to tinker with evaluation order. Sticking to the one we have at foswiki is very important. What I am saying is that it is evaluation order which makes the difference between foswiki and xwiki (and mediawiki). That we can't borrow from xwiki.

-- MichaelDaum - 16 May 2012

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