I'm trying to use child markdowns to improve the modularity of a big report (for ease of code review and maintainability) but I still want a single html document at the end of the day. I've refactored my report into a bunch of child markdowns and call each in a code chunk header from a parent Rmd. It renders fine but I'm curious how people do on-going development (in Rstudio)?
For example, if I want to work on child markdown #9 and it depends on previous child markdowns do I have to manually open and run all the code chunks in child markdowns 1-8 before working on #9? I thought I could just "run all code chunks above" the 9th one in the parent markdown and then open Rmd#9 and work on it interactively in Rstudio, but the child markdowns called from code chunk headers do not seem to be executed unless the document is actually knit. Do I understand that right? I feel like I'm missing some kind of simple configuration option or something in Rstudio that will do this?
This earlier post seems related, but as far as I can tell it hasn't been resolved? How can I run all chunks *across all documents* in a bookdown project?
I'm less familiar with bookdown but I've explored if that some how avoids this issue, but it also seems like it is hard to work on isolated "chapter" markdowns without also manually running each previous chapter.
Any recommendations on how to work interactively in Rstudio with child markdowns and/or bookdown chapters would be great. Even just confirming that I have to manually open and run each child markdown would be useful so I stop looking for a better way...