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Building a simple search macro in Confluence

Bernd Steffens

Hello,

i am new to plugin programming for Confluence. So far i worked through the related Atlassian tutorials and everything worked fine.

Now for reaching the next level I want to build a simple search macro. It should be able to search through all my Confluence pages and also works with the keyword AND (for two search requests) but excludes and. I know I could use the basic search function from Confluence, but my goal here is to learn plugin building.

My problem, as a beginner I am not really sure how to start. So far I created an empty plugin project and made the tweaks in the pom and the plugin descriptor. But what should I do next?

Accepted answers

DPKJ

@Bernd Steffens Welcome to the community!!!

I can give you brief idea about how to step further,

There are couple of scenario,

Static search result macro,

In this macro you will get search term in macro input while creating macro
and in result you will display results
For this kind of macro,
- Get started with custom macro module
- Create one input for search text
- On macro back-end code (java part) call confluence's search provider and fetch results in Java
- Render these results in macro response

Dynamic search result macro,

In this macro user will enter search term on confluence page and will see result in same page only
For this,
- Create a custom macro module
  - You won't need any input from user in start (later on you can add inputs in macro to limit search etc)
  - Your Macro code must return HTML with "INPUT" field, and space to show search result. (Basically it will need one form with input tag and button and empty div tag for results to appear)
- Now you need to create a custom web resource module
  - In this you will create Javascript file (with global context)
  - This javascript, will trap submission of "form" returned by your macro
  - and later call some rest api (either standard or your custom api, rest plugin module is need to create custom api's)
  - and render results from this.

You can customize this scenario as much you like.

Happy Coding!!!

All comments

DPKJ

@Bernd Steffens Welcome to the community!!!

I can give you brief idea about how to step further,

There are couple of scenario,

Static search result macro,

In this macro you will get search term in macro input while creating macro
and in result you will display results
For this kind of macro,
- Get started with custom macro module
- Create one input for search text
- On macro back-end code (java part) call confluence's search provider and fetch results in Java
- Render these results in macro response

Dynamic search result macro,

In this macro user will enter search term on confluence page and will see result in same page only
For this,
- Create a custom macro module
  - You won't need any input from user in start (later on you can add inputs in macro to limit search etc)
  - Your Macro code must return HTML with "INPUT" field, and space to show search result. (Basically it will need one form with input tag and button and empty div tag for results to appear)
- Now you need to create a custom web resource module
  - In this you will create Javascript file (with global context)
  - This javascript, will trap submission of "form" returned by your macro
  - and later call some rest api (either standard or your custom api, rest plugin module is need to create custom api's)
  - and render results from this.

You can customize this scenario as much you like.

Happy Coding!!!

Bernd Steffens

Thank you very much for your answer. So far I only have basic coding skills in Java. So the static solution seems more suitable for me. And actually my general idea of how to proceed is similiar:

create custom macro module
program an input mask in the macro
implement the search function

But i'm kinda stuck on step 2. Read lots ot tutorials and documentation from Atlassian, but I don't really found what I was looking for. Can you help me taking the next step?

Thanks in advance!

DPKJ

You can proceed something like this,

In atlassian-plugin.xml file create a macro definition these lines,

<xhtml-macro key="search-macro"
             name="Search Macro"
             class="com.example.plugins.macro.SearchMacro"
             icon="/download/resources/icons/search.png" >
    <category name="visuals"/>
 <parameters>
 <parameter name="search" type="string" required="true"/>
 </parameters>
</xhtml-macro>

Now you need create a corresponding Java class to program this Macro,

package com.example.plugins.macro.SearchMacro

/* OTHER IMPORTS */

class SearchMacro implements Macro
{
  static final String TEMPLATE = "templates/macro/default.vm";

  public SearchMacro()
  {
  //You can bind search service here
  }

  @Override
  public BodyType getBodyType()
  {
return BodyType.NONE;
  }

@Override
  public Macro.OutputType getOutputType()
  {
return OutputType.BLOCK;
  }

@Override
  public String execute(Map<String, String> params, String body,
                        ConversionContext context) throws MacroExecutionException
  {
    String search = parmas.get('search'); //this your input search string
return ""; // return template with search results
  }

I hope this resolves your basic problem of getting past step 2.

You can learn about searching in this example - https://developer.atlassian.com/server/confluence/searching-using-the-v2-search-api/

Bernd Steffens

Thanks for being so patient with me. I studied the article about using the v2 search API before, but it didn't work. But am I right that I need some kind of code like that for

 public SearchMacro()
  {
  //You can bind search service here
  }

and I am not sure what you mean here:

String search = parmas.get('search'); //this your input search string

does this create the input mask?

I'm sorry, but I'm getting more and more confused. I understand the basic concept, but can't cope to the details.

Deepanshu Natani

@Monique vdB:

@DPKJdeserves the Random Acts of Community badge for this. He actually developed a Confluence Add-on and provided the entire code to help the community member.

On a different event, he helped a community member by developing an add-on for Jira!

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