How can I pass selected text to a user macro parameter?

Brock Winstead

I have a user macro that ideally would take as one parameter the text that the user has selected in the editor. I know that many macros added via the macro browser will take the user's selection and turn it into the body of the macro, e.g. wrapping an excerpt macro around it. Is there a way to fill one parameter, instead of the body, with the user's selected text? 

In other words, my ideal situation would be something like:

## @Param text:title=Text|type=string|required=true|desc=Body text|default=[some way of accessing the text selected by the user in the editor]

Brock Winstead

I answered my own question, but ended up answering a couple of other questions along the way. It's not possible to define the user macro itself to pull the selection into a parameter. But!

What I really wanted to do was create a custom button on the editor toolbar that opened the macro browser and fed any selected text to the first parameter of my user macro. I don't have to ability to do the kind of plugin development that would "properly" add a button to the toolbar, so I had to resort to JavaScript hacks to make it all happen.

I'll leave out the JS that adds the custom button to the editor toolbar (basically: use an existing button to create the right HTML, use .after() to put it after an existing button). Here's the click event function that I attach to that custom button, with abstracted values.

AJS.$('#id-of-custom-button').click( function(){
  var settings = {};
  settings.selectedMacro = {
    "name":"parametername",
    "schemaVersion":1,
    "body":"",
    "defaultParameterValue":"",
    "params":{
      "param1":AJS.Rte.getEditor().selection.getContent(),
      "param2":""}
  };
  settings.onComplete = tinyMCE.confluence.macrobrowser.macroBrowserComplete;
  settings.onCancel = tinyMCE.confluence.macrobrowser.macroBrowserCancel;

  AJS.MacroBrowser.open(settings);
  function setFocus() {
    if (!AJS.MacroBrowser.fields.param2) {
      window.requestAnimationFrame(setFocus);
    } else {
      AJS.MacroBrowser.fields.param2.input.select();
    }
  };
  setFocus();
});

Here's the breakdown:

• Create an empty settings object
• Add a selectedMacro object to the settings, with some minimum required items
  • including feeding the value of the currently selected text to the first parameter
• Add the standard complete and cancel functions to the settings (which tells the macro browser what to do when you click "Save" or "Cancel", and if not specified, it causes problems)
• Open the macro browser with the constructed settings, which fills the text parameter properly
• Set focus on the second parameter, so the user isn't redundantly focused on the pre-filled text parameter. (But the focus setter is wrapped in a function that waits until the macro browser is rendered, because otherwise: problems.)

All of this JS goes at the very bottom of the Main Layout template. 

Again, this is just the click event handler. There's some preceding JS that adds the custom button.

So that's one way, at least, to pass selected text into a parameter, not the body, of a macro.

P.S. My user macro has two required parameters. If it had only one required parameter, it would be possible to use a different MacroBrowser function to insert it immediately on button click.