Looking for best practices to automate the population of a template with data/info from an Access db

Cameron Koch

I am working on a project that needs to create several different documentation pieces from information we are currently storing in an Access db. The info will likely be exported into Excel initially, but I am looking for a way to populate a template I would create in Confluence with this info. Each row in Excel would have all the info for a specific piece, but each row may not have all of the same types of info. Does anyone have best practices on creating a template that is flexible to this variation and how best to fill the template with that info? If it helps, there will be 1000's a pages to create across all documentation pieces that would be generated in this way...hopefully. An example of info for each row:

1. variable name
2. related variable names
3. question info
4. values
5. helpful info
6. disclosure notes
7. skip logic notes

Daniel Eads

Hi Cameron, welcome to the Community!

This is an interesting question I'll provide some ideas on based on what's available in the Marketplace. 

• ConfiTemplates is an app that adds some functions to templates in Confluence Cloud. You could create a template with the help of the app and use URL parameters to pass variables into the template. Some scripting would be required to get the rows from Excel/Access turned into a URL request, but I see this as a fairly straightforward script compared to some other ways of building what you need. If I were doing this work, I'd give myself an afternoon to play with the ConfiTemplates app and maybe a couple hours the next day as buffer to work on the CSV -> Confluence script.
• External Data for Confluence allows you to connect data sources and embed them on Confluence pages. Depending on what you've got in your Excel export, this might be an ok option. I get the impression you want some fancier pages, but this might be a good route to go if you need to just show the material and don't want to spend much time on it.
• Confluence Command Line Interface is an app that lets you script out a lot of functions that would normally be arduous API calls. I could see someone completing the work you're looking at (essentially creating a lot of pages, probably with a template, using some data you need to pass in) with the CLI app. Out of all the options, this is probably the most involved in terms of setup if you're not already familiar with this app, but it also might provide extra configuration you might need depending on the complexity/extensibility you want to go for.

Hope that's helpful in giving you some pointers!

Cheers,
Daniel