Hi all,
I have a possibly weird question: I'm writing two different R Markdown documents in the same R Studio project (which I can link here if needed, it's on RStudio Cloud). One uses a certain approach, let's call it data_driven_report.rmd, and another one uses a different approach, let's call it first_principles_based_report.rmd. Both reports have a section called Background which is exactly the same. Having a duplicate section in both documents doesn't make sense, for the usual reasons why we don't duplicate code across projects. Thus I would like to move this section to a background.Rmd document, which I then source or in some other way recall in both documents, at knitting time. How can I do that?
I heard about bookdown, but my problem is a bit different from writing a book with multiple chapters, and either bookdown is not the right tool, or I don't understand how to use it correctly for this use case. If I just put an index.Rmd file in the same folder as background.Rmd, data_driven_report.rmd and first_principles_based_report.rmd, then once I knit index.Rmd , it tries to knit all three documents together, rather than two separate documents.
I could of course create two different folders with two different index.Rmd documents, one for data_driven_report.rmd and the other for first_principles_based_report.rmd. But I would have to copy background.Rmd to both folders. If I make a modification to the background.Rmd file in one folder, I need to remember to copy it to the other folder. It's not exactly error prone, and a step above my current cut&paste approach, but still not great. Can you help me adopt better knitting practices? Thanks!