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Searching archived content

Neta Knyazhansky Caspy

Hello,

When I choose to search archived content, does it include historic versions of a non-archived page?
If not, how can I search that?

We have a page to track a certain process, when we're done with part of it, we delete it and rely on the page's history in case we need to investigate what happened and when.
When searching now, including archived content, nothing comes up, but when I go to the page's history, I do find what I was looking for.

Thanks

Accepted answers

Darryl Lee

Hm. Interesting suggestion @Evercross evo8e, although the Wayback Machine only works on publicly-accessible websites. I would venture to guess that most Confluence sites are not public.

To your question, @Neta Knyazhansky Caspy - search does not include earlier versions of a page, whether or not it is archived.

That is an interesting use case you've described. If your case is that you frequently need to search through the history of a page, I kind of feel like the process (although I don't like it) would be to:

Rename the old page to - "Page Title - 04/16/2023"
Copy the page, and rename it to "Page Title"
Archive the old page.

Ugh. That's... cumbersome.

I wonder if the new Automation for Confluence might be able to make this easier. Checking now...

All comments

Darryl Lee

Hm. Interesting suggestion @Evercross evo8e, although the Wayback Machine only works on publicly-accessible websites. I would venture to guess that most Confluence sites are not public.

To your question, @Neta Knyazhansky Caspy - search does not include earlier versions of a page, whether or not it is archived.

Rename the old page to - "Page Title - 04/16/2023"
Copy the page, and rename it to "Page Title"
Archive the old page.

Ugh. That's... cumbersome.

I wonder if the new Automation for Confluence might be able to make this easier. Checking now...

Darryl Lee

For fun, I made an Automation rule to do the kind of copy/archive operation that would facilitate searching through Archived pages.

Unfortunately Automation does not currently have an "Edit action", nor is the actual content of a page (the "body") available as a Smart Value. So I ended up having to make two web requests to the Confluence REST API: one to get the current body of the page, and a second one to update the title.

What else -- oh right, required parameter "status" doesn't actually do anything when changed to archived, so I have to have another branch to actually archive the old page.

Lastly - unlike in Jira, there's no way to manually trigger automation rules from a given page, so I used a label, "archivenow".

At any rate, I got to learn a lot more about Automation for Confluence, and one thing I learned is that without a {{page.body}} Smart Value and an "Edit page" action, it's pretty limited. Here's a copy of the rule:

Screen Shot 2023-04-16 at 6.31.08 PM.png

Neta Knyazhansky Caspy

Thank you so much for your thorough answer, @Darryl Lee
I really appreciate it and happy you got to learn from it as well.

Is there a quick way to merge historic versions?
So I could create one "master" version to copy and archive, then go on as you so kindly explained.

Darryl Lee

When you said "merge historic versions" I keep thinking about the built-in Page History.

But this history is not searchable.

I like the idea of maybe somehow "nesting" the archived pages under a parent, so you can easily see all the versions.

Alas, Archived Pages are (annoyingly) all thrown in a flat file structure. No hierarchy is preserved or available. So this is also a no-go. :-/

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