How to keep cross-reference links in documents uploaded to Confluence up-to-date?

[petr agulin]

How can I ensure that cross-reference links in text documents uploaded to Confluence automatically remain up to date in a situation when new versions of those documents are being uploaded to Confluence all the time? For example, assume there are two Word documents uploaded to Confluence's File List types of pages. They've just been uploaded for the first time, so they both have version 1. One of these documents contains a crosslink to the second document. Then assume that we update the second document with some fresh content and re-upload it (with the same name) to its page in Confluence. That creates Version 2 of that document in the system. Now, the link in the first document which was initially created based on the version 1 of the second document is not working. Clicking on that link leads to a page that says that the requested page is not found.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

When you look at the list of attachments on a page, you have several links to them exposed.  Most of the links are specific for a version of an attachment, but one of them is a more simple link to "latest"

If, for example, we have two versions of a file and we expand it for the versions, we get a display like:

• File.doc
  • Version 2 (latest)
  • Version 1

The urls linked to by Version 2 and version 1 are to that specific version, but the link to File.doc will not have a version, and points to "latest"

I suspect you are getting your urls from elsewhere, and they're not the ones from the attachments view?

[petr agulin]

Thank you for your answer, Nic, I appreciate it.
I figured out that the thing which was causing my problem was totally different.
You are right saying that URLs obtained from the upper "File.doc" file are "universal" and will always direct you to the LATEST version of the document. And that's exactly what I needed. It didn't work for me at first because of a pretty strange issue:

After I copied URL from the upper "File.doc", I would then select my desired text in some other document, right click on it, choose "Hyperlink" and then I would paster the URL. What I discovered is that the URL copied and the URL inserted were different. The one that appeared after insertion was missing its ending - several charcters compared to the original. I can't imagine why it happens (being a long time user of Word I see this behavior for the very first time). It looks as if the field where you normally insert your URL has limitation as to the number of characters. That's probably a bug in my current version of MS Word or some other bug, because I do know there shouldn't be such restrictions.

Anyways, I resolved my original question about keeping the links up-to-date, thank you again.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

That is odd!  But yes, sounds like a bug in Word!