Showing date of creation instead of date of upload with Confluence attachments.

Question

Hi Everyone!

I'm working on migrating my program's entire repository onto Confluence, and was presented with a question from my program manager that stumped me.

Is there any way to denote a document's date of creation as opposed to its upload date? The files we are moving span back to the early '00s, and I'd like to be able to show at least a little bit of a time span instead of having each of the hundreds of documents show Feb 28, 2019.

Thanks so much in advance for your help!

Bill Bailey · Accepted Answer

I did a lot of research on this for doc list macro I wrote fpr a published document repository. Unfortunately, there is not a file creation date property for attachments. You can only do .getCreationDate, .getLastModificationDate.

And Creation date here refers to the date the attachment was first attached. I could find no way to access the file properties.

My only suggestion is that once you create the page, you write a one-time-use macro/script that does nothing but reset all of the attachment dates you want using .setCreationDate/.setLastModificationDate. Yes a royal pain but I don't know of any other way to do this.

James Dellow · Accepted Answer

If you upload a file through the user interface (i.e. the web browser), Confluence has no idea of the file's original creation date. So if you want retain those creation dates, you'll need to migrate the files in a different way or try making changes at a database level - I would suggest talking to an Atlassian partner with experience doing this.

However, if you have a relatively small number of files you could try editing the space xml export file to change the file creation dates. Each attachment object includes a creationDate property. You'll need to upload to Confluence, export the space, delete it, change the dates in the XML file, then reimport.

An alternative idea - can you add a hint about the creation date to the filename before upload?