Issue nesting excerpts within one another

[Tom Clark]

I have a customer-facing documentation page, on which I want to list dependant software for our platform.  There is a table for the various VMs running elements of the platform and each has an OS and software version.

There is repetition in the table, so I want to use the 'Insert excerpt' macro to call the values from a single source of each element that is repeated, such that when we test and update e.g. the OS of the VMs, we can quickly change that and have it propagate across our documentation.

There is also repetition across our documentation as we have different variations of the software.  So I want to also define this table as an excerpt and use that across several pages within the site.

The table works fine (normal excerpts), but when it is called to other pages (nested excerpts), each excerpt works once within the table, but I get a warning for the second (and for each further) instance of each excerpt: "This insert excerpt macro cannot insert an excerpt that it is nested within".

I have tried recreating both the original excerpts and the table (which was quite laborious) and it hasn't changed.

Has anyone experienced this and found a workaround?  Can anyone at Atlassian confirm the behaviour and suggest a workaround or raise a bug?

[Barbara Szczesniak · Accepted solution]

@Tom Clark Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

There is, in fact, already a related defect (that Atlassian has classified as a Suggestion): https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-78513 

You can review the content, recent updates, and comments to see if you can glean anything to help in your situation. You might also search in the Questions area (where you posted this question) to find related questions and responses.

[Tom Clark]

Thanks very much Barbara - I did have a look through existing Qs - but couldn't find much - useful to know it's a wider problem than just nesting the excerpt/insert excerpt macros, I'll widen my search for a workaround.

[Graham Carrick]

I ran into this issue in the past so built an App which addresses this challenge and some other improvements related to including content from one page in another. 

Check out Crafted Includes for Confluence and let me know if that helps or you have questions and/or suggestions for other include related features.