Thread:Extension talk:TemplateData/Inheritance/reply (2)

I agree that the capability of modified inheritance where parameters are inherited from another template, but modified, would be nice to have. This would be of significant benefit for the citation templates on enwiki.

However, given that the template you are asking about is using wiki-template code, not Lua, it can not implement generic parameter pass-through. I am not aware of the ability within wiki-template code to pass generic template parameter names from a template call through to a template being called by that template. Unless I am mistaken in my understanding, that means that generic inheritance of TemplateData is not appropriate in such instances because it is not possible for the calling template to pas through any parameters added to the underlying template without modification to the calling template. If the calling template uses Lua it is possible to pass parameters with names which are not hard coded into the calling template. Thus, with Lua the ability to have generic inheritance of TemplateData is appropriate.

What you appear to desire is something where you specify a list of parameters to inherit from the template you are calling, but not inherit parameters not contained on such a list.

If it is that you want to duplicate, without modification, the TemplateData structure from a specific template, I would expect you would be able to do so by transcluding the TemplateData structure from the other template.