Link to a specific attachment version

Alex Stoeckli

Hi,

Confluence saves the page with a reference to an attachment, but no version:

<ac:link>
	<ri:attachment ri:filename="Attachment.pdf">
		<ri:page ri:content-title="Other Page"/>
	</ri:attachment>
	<ac:plain-text-link-body><![CDATA[Stuff]]></ac:plain-text-link-body>
</ac:link>

So this would always point to the most current version of the attachment.

I would like to point to a specific version (e.g. v2, even though there is a v5). Is there a solution for this?

Thank you in advance.

Diego_88dj6o

Hello there!

First thing I would like to address is that in Confluence, we have two types of links:

• Soft Links
• Hard Links

Soft links are the links we insert using Confluence way of linking, the linking tool. Those links are automatically updated on Base URL change. This type of link works only for internal stuff.

Hard Links are links we refer using the URL address itself. Those links are what we are used to have all over the internet. We need to manually update them if something happen to the original address.

As you have noted Alex, the soft links do not refer to a specific version. They look straight into the latest.

To refer to a specific attachment version straight into a link, we could proceed like this:

1. Go to the page in which the attachment is present
2. Preview the attachment
3. Open the download link in another tab
   1. It should look like this:
      1. http://youraddress:8090/download/attachments/983041/MyAttachment.png?version=3&modificationDate=1553524676608&api=v2&download=true
4. Copy that link
5. Change the version= parameter to the desired version
6. Link that to your desired page

Notes:

• This is a hard link, deleting the attachment version will cause a 404
• You will need to update the link manually if needed
• You can change download=true to preview=true so the download is not immediately triggered when a user clicks the link

Now, we can achieve something more polished if we use the Attachments Macro. However, this will show all attachment versions. What we need to check is that Include old attachment versions is checked before publishing the page.

Now, can I ask you something else? What is the objective of this link to an older version of an attachment in Confluence?

Maybe we can help you to create a more clean way of doing what you need to achieve!

Looking forward to your reply Alex!

 

Edit: if you need to look a little deeper into the Storage Format, you can take a look here:

Confluence Storage Format