How can I show a "Last Updated" date on sections / excerpts?

[Mike Georges]

Hello,

I am trying to have more detailed "Last Updated" info on our pages. Ideally, I would like to be able to display, for a page, multiple "Last Updated" values for each section of the page.

I know I could most likely separate each section into child pages and include them into the parent page with macros, but I'm looking for something that would not require splitting pages, we already have a lot and it'd make search and navigation more messy.

Basically, a section could either be delimited by headings (a la Table of Contents), or excerpts, and I would be able to setup a macro somewhere on the page that gives information about the last edit date for this section instead of the whole page only.

Of course if anyone know of a way that uses something else for sections, I'm also interested.

Thanks for reading and have a nice day

Mike

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Confluence doesn't have any functions that would do that.  You would need to write code that could work out where you are delimiting your sections, then go into the history to look at the last time each section was changed to be displayed (that could be quite hard to write as well, it would have to be able to deal with sections being added or removed as well as just the content changing)

I'm not aware of any app that can do this, server or cloud!

[Mike Georges]

Thanks for the input!

That does seem quite challenging indeed .-. Do you reckon HTML Macros / User Macros would be the best way to attempt this? Or would something else be better?

I'm completely new to those so I might be wrong, but while I feel like I could potentially get to a point where I could collect the text and headers to make out sections, it feels like there'd be no way with a macro to get info on their previous states. Does that sound about right?

Another way I thought about, would be to make calls to the API, save a copy of each page, and locally make a script that compares the previous copy of a page to the new one. That result would be then accessed with an HTML macro within the page. Would that make more sense?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I think it would need to be a fully-fledged app, I'm not sure you could do everything in a macro.  Calls to the API from an external service would also be quite a lot of coding, although, yes, you would be able to construct a small macro that fetches data from the remote storage.

However, I think your initial suggestion of splitting pages is by far the best (and easiest) option here. 

[Mike Georges]

Definitely would be the easiest one, we already have issues with people struggling to find stuff with our huge amount of pages though, so I don't want to split pages and make this even worse haha.

Luckily I have a lot of "not a lot" to do these days, so I'll take some time to investigate the API / remote storage solution. Thanks for your comments!

Hope you have a nice day and weekend.