Confluence Cloud Automation: How to keep a Jira work items macro dynamic for future meeting pages cr

[Melissa Mleczkowski]

Hi everyone,

I am trying to solve a process problem in Confluence Cloud + Jira, and I am not sure whether I am using the wrong technical approach.

Business use case

We create meeting minutes pages in Confluence from a template about one month in advance.

Each page represents one specific meeting date, for example:

28.04.2026 Meeting Minutes 

On each page, we want to display an embedded Jira issue list for the topics relevant to that specific meeting date.

This is important because:

• people work directly from the Confluence agenda page
• they do not want to jump back and forth to Jira
• the page is later also used for PDF export / documentation
• the embedded Jira table is useful because users can open the issue details in the right-side panel

The real process problem

Topics are planned in Jira.

If a topic is postponed from one meeting to the next, it should automatically disappear from the old meeting page and appear on the next one.

So the Confluence page for meeting date X should always show the Jira topics for date X, not for “today”.

What I tried

• create a Confluence page from a template using Automation
• create a variable like DueDate = {{now.plusDays(28).format("yyyy-MM-dd")}}
• then use Send web request with PUT to update the page body
• I tested both:
  
  • inserting a Jira URL with JQL
  • updating the page storage body directly
  • trying to preserve the existing Jira macro / datasource block
• simple text replacement works
• a dynamic Jira link with the correct date also works
• but as soon as I update the full storage body, the Jira macro / smart link rendering breaks or the page content gets overwritten
• I also ran into versioning issues (Version must be incremented on update) and JSON escaping issues

What works

• updating the Confluence page body via REST
• inserting a dynamic link with the calculated date
• using a variable like {{DueDate}}

What does NOT work reliably

• keeping the existing template content and only changing the Jira macro section
• updating the Jira work items macro in storage format
• preserving the native Jira table / side panel behavior after rewriting storage
• in some attempts the Jira block renders as broken content or “This Jira page cannot be displayed”

Question

Is there any supported way in Confluence Cloud Automation to:

1. create a page from a template,
2. keep the embedded Jira work items macro,
3. and dynamically set its JQL/date per generated page?

Or is updating the macro via storage/REST fundamentally unsupported / unreliable in Cloud?

If this is not supported, what would be the recommended pattern for this use case?

Thanks in advance

Melissa

[Ajay _view26_]

Hi @Melissa Mleczkowski 

I think the key is to avoid inserting a static list of issue keys into the page.

The Jira work items macro stays dynamic if it is based on JQL (or a Jira filter URL), because the macro re-runs the query when the page is viewed. So if a topic is postponed in Jira and no longer matches the query for Meeting A, it should disappear from that page automatically and appear on the next page if it now matches Meeting B.

A pattern that usually works is:
- add a dedicated Jira field for the planned meeting date (or meeting ID)
- create each Confluence page from automation/template
- insert a Jira work items macro whose JQL filters on that field for that specific meeting

For example, instead of embedding specific issue keys, the macro should query something like: "Meeting date" = "2026-04-28"

That way the Confluence page becomes a live view of Jira data, not a snapshot.