Forum:Infobox Help - Removing need for duplicate information

I've been staring at this problem for too long. Hopefully I'll make some sense. I'm working on an Infobox; Infobox. It's being complicated by the fact that the NPCs can show up in multiple games. To make that simpler I have multiple subtemplates that are placed inside the main template. Each subtemplate will be for specific information about that game.

One part of that subtemplate information is the portrait. That means that the subtemplate knows what size the portrait should be but the main template doesn't. Trouble is that I want one of the portraits to appear up near the top. The way that I have it currently the portrait is entered twice. Once in the main template and once in the subtemplate. I'd like to avoid this.

I've had a couple ideas.

1) Have the "top" subtemplate display everything from the portrait near the top down through the Appearances header and the stuff it is currently showing. Trouble is that the maintemplate has some stuff that should be displayed right in the middle (currently just "Species") and the subtemplate doesn't have that info so it can't show it.

2) Screw it and have them enter it twice. Make them tell the main template what game the portrait is from so it can display it the right size. Problems with this; I dislike them entering it twice still. They will get lazy and stop entering it in the second location (I need it in the subtemplate so I can use dpl to make NPC lists later). I don't like making them specify what game it is to the main template seems unnecessarily complicated.

Thanks for reading my wall of text. -- Fenyx4 20:21, April 27, 2010 (UTC)


 * It would really make it easier to actually get a link to the templates in question. However, I don't see why the main template can't just pass the portrait to the sub-template, but only in the case where the sub-template is used in the main template. -- Fandyllic  (talk &middot; contr) 10:06 PM PST 27 Apr 2010


 * Sorry, the link I gave above is to a page that uses template. Here is a link to the template; . And here are the two subtemplates I've made for it so far;  and.
 * As you can see I'm passing the subtemplates in as parameters. The main template isn't calling them itself. -- Fenyx4 22:34, April 27, 2010 (UTC)


 * Have you ever used Parser functions? A parser function,  could really help you by putting everything back into the one template, thus avoiding the portrait problem you have at the moment. :)  The 888th Avatar   (talk)  22:57, April 27, 2010 (UTC)


 * I just went to the trouble of splitting it out into multiple templates. There are 19 games. Shoving all that into one template with a bunch of  would create an insanely huge number of parameters. Right now with just the information in my prototype template the template would need 60 parameters. -- Fenyx4 13:05, April 28, 2010 (UTC)