More Performant Alternative to Excerpts

[Jack Shade]

Excerpts are extremely helpful in supporting a single source of truth in documentation. However, it seems that creating a large number of excerpts causes significant lag on the source page itself, not just on the pages that import excerpts from it.

This is problematic because I have some 200 items that I want to be able to "import" into other pages. Are there other alternatives to excerpts that are more performant or some way to utilize the existing excerpts with less performance impact?

[Kristian Klima]

Hi @Jack Shade 

A slightly different approach that would work on a page level...

Ricksoft's Space Sync for Confluence allows you to sync (think push) individual pages to multiple spaces.

So you would have a Source space acting as a repository of your shareable pages, then you'd establish connections between the source and the target spaces, then you'd simply update your source pages and push them to the target space.

The advantage of this approach is on the performance level. Whatever you push to the target space, becomes a native part of that target space, so it's treated as page from that space, not as content that's sucked from somewhere else by way of a macro.

Yes, it would require some content refactoring but it would solve the excerpt galore issue.

[Jack Shade]

Hey Kristian, that sounds promising as far as performance goes! I'd like to be able to reuse specific items so I'll look this over and see if Space Sync can work

[Lucas Modzelewski _Lumo_]

Hi @Jack Shade , welcome to the Community!

You can check:

• Include Page macro: https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/insert-the-include-page-macro/ 
• Page Properties macro: https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/insert-the-page-properties-macro/

[Jack Shade]

Thanks Lukasz! Ideally I want to import specific items from the page but I'll try this out and see if it can meet my needs

[Jan Reinhardt]

Hi Jack!

I know this is an old thread, but as the issue persists in general, - how about splitting your source page into multiple pages? I recently have experimented with this too and found out i can safely have around 50 excerpt macro instances on a page before it gets odd. 

I do not know how the excerpt macro is working on the backend, but i have written an app that "builds its own excerpt database" in the back.

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1513354259/bumpin-confluence-citations

This app easily handles the 50 instances per page with 1k content each and significantly more depending on what else is on that page. Plus, you get tracking, list exports, search field, etc. . Maybe still interesting for you. If not, sorry for the hassle.

Regards

Jan

[Mattia _Elevatic_]

Hello @Jack Shade,

Welcome to the community.

Another alternative to the options already mentioned for publishing entire page content elsewhere without replicating it is tabs generated from existing pages. Our Navitabs app offers various options for displaying existing page content elsewhere.

Currently, listing only these pages' excerpts in the tabs is not possible. However, if we hear more and more of this need from our customers, it would be something for our future development.

Kind regards,

Mattia

[Jack Shade]

Hey Mattia, I'll take a look at your plugin and evaluate, thanks!