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Is there a way to uncheck all action items on a page?

Matthew Ogrady

We have a release checklist containing a number of action items to check off. We use this page every two weeks and instead of us having to manually uncheck the items I would like to automate it so when we come upon release week we have a fresh checklist to run through.

How can I make that possible via automation?

Accepted answers

All comments

Bill Sheboy

Hi @Matthew Ogrady -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Do you mean an action item list on a Confluence page?

If so, I do not think there is a built-in rule action to edit a page that way. As a workaround, I hypothesize a rule could:

load the page contents using the REST API and the Send Web Request action
find / replace the task-status values of "complete" with "incomplete"
use the REST API again to update the page content

Kind regards,
Bill

Darryl Lee

Hey @Matthew Ogrady and @Bill Sheboy - I actually recently attempted to do exactly what Matthew is asking as part of my attempt to implement Page Approvals in Confluence (sorry my Appfire friends) using Automation.

I was using action items (in Confluence they're actually called Tasks) for these approvals, and in the case where a previously approved page is edited, I wanted to clear the prior approvals.

Anyways, it turns out there is a Tasks API!

So was super-excited that I could Get tasks for the page with a Web Request like:

https://MYSITE.atlassian.net/wiki/api/v2/tasks?body-format=storage&page-id={{page.id}}

So with the unique task IDs, I figured it would be a slam dunk to simply use the Update task call for each ID, setting the status to incomplete.

UNFORTUNATELY I ran into a bug.

Even though I'm updating completely different tasks, Atlassian apparently really really doesn't like you to make Update task calls at the same time. And Automation actions annoyingly run in parallel.

So I got this error for every task except one:

{"errors":[{"status":409,"code":"CONFLICT","title":"Encountered conflict updating task with global id [979962]","detail":null}]}, {"errors":[{"status":409,"code":"CONFLICT","title":"Encountered conflict updating task with global id [979960]","detail":null}]}

I opened a support ticket for this, and it resulted in this bug being created:

CONFCLOUD-80654 - Improve Conflict Resolution for Task API in Confluence

I'd love for it to get more votes so we could do more cool stuff with Tasks like this.

Darryl Lee

Here's the portion of the rule that SHOULD clear the completed tasks (REMINDER THIS DOES NOT WORK DUE TO CONFCLOUD-80654):

I made things more complicated by myself by using Bill's trick to add an additional "filter" so that I'm only touching Tasks that contain the word "Approve".

So in "Create variable", completedApprovalsList is set to:

{{#webResponse.body.results}}{{#if(body.storage.value.match(".*(Approve).*").isNotEmpty())}}{{id}}{{^last}},{{/}}{{/}}{{/}}

And then in "For each: Smart value" the completedApproval variable is generated from this Smart value:

{{completedApprovalsList.split(",")}}

If you didn't care about that, you would simply use something like this in "For each":

{{webResponse.body.results.id}}

Bill Sheboy

Hi @Darryl Lee

Did you find information if there is actually additional information stored for the tasks (necessitating use of the endpoint), or if that is all automagically based on the Confluence page contents?

If there is additional information, and there are <= 10 tasks on the page, the recursive, incoming webhook trigger rule trick could be used to prevent the update collisions through chained rule executions
If there is no additional info (which was the hypothesis of my answer), the body storage could be directly updated to change the task status values. I only have a free license, or I would have experimented to validate that ;^)

Kind regards,
Bill

Darryl Lee

Hey @Bill Sheboy - so this endpoint:

https://MYSITE.atlassian.net/wiki/api/v2/tasks?body-format=storage&page-id={{page.id}}

Is this API:
https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/confluence/rest/v2/api-group-task/#api-group-task

And it returns a lot of information, but the only thing I'm concerned about is the id and status for each task in results. (Well, I'm lying, because I also look at body to see if it contains the word "Approve")

At any rate, in my particular use case, there should only be 4 tasks (approvals) per page, and so, unless other tasks were created on the page, sure, I have less than 10 tasks.

Can you send me a link to the recursive, incoming webhook trigger rule trick you're talking about? I don't have that one bookmarked. :-}

Sure, body storage could be updated, but ugh, I spent a few hours this week messing with replace to try and get an AI summary of a Jira ticket into Confluence, and it was NOT FUN.

Ah, in this case it might not be as painful because after you GET the page content, you'd put it back with the value:

{{webResponse.body.body.storage.value.replaceAll("<ac:task-status>complete<\/ac:task-status>", "<ac:task-status>incomplete<\/ac:task-status>").jsonEncode}}

HUH, that might even work in my case IF the pages that need approvals cleared don't have any other tasks. NICE!

Darryl Lee

Yup. Once again, @Bill Sheboy is right. "This is the way."

Screenshot 2025-02-15 at 7.02.39 PM.png

URL to GET:

https://YOURSITE.atlassian.net/wiki/api/v2/pages/{{page.id}}?body-format=storage

URL to PUT:

https://YOURSITE.atlassian.net/wiki/api/v2/pages/{{page.id}}

(Although it turns out Atlassian will ignore if you have "?body-format=storage" in the PUT)

Custom data:

{
  "id": "{{page.id}}",
  "status": "current",
  "title": "{{webResponse.body.title}}",
  "body": {
    "representation": "storage",
    "value": "{{webResponse.body.body.storage.value.replaceAll("<ac:task-status>complete<\/ac:task-status>", "<ac:task-status>incomplete<\/ac:task-status>").jsonEncode}}"
  },
  "version": {
    "number": {{webResponse.body.version.number.plus(1)}},
    "message": "Clearing Tasks"
  }
}

If you're unfamiliar with using Atlassian's REST API from within Automation, here's a good explainer: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-articles/Automation-for-Jira-Send-web-request-using-Jira-REST-API/ba-p/1443828

You can pretty much use my Rule as-is, but you'll need to follow those instructions to generate the Authorization header for both Web Requests.

Bill Sheboy

Thanks for creating the example, @Darryl Lee !

Did you try replace() rather than replaceAll() to avoid the need for escaping the characters?

Darryl Lee

Hey @Bill Sheboy ah, that's a good point. However, for my use case, I needed regular expressions so I could get a little fancier (*sigh*) and search for "Approve" in the body of each task, so I'm ONLY clearing "Approval" tasks.

I end up having to include that text back in the replacement text, so regular expression is required. (It also lets me get fancy with where Approve appears in the task body, and whether it's capitalized.)

So here's what the value looked like in my final rule:

{{webResponse.body.body.storage.value.replaceAll("<ac:task-status>complete</ac:task-status>\\n<ac:task-body>(.*?[Aa]pprove.*?)</ac:task-body>", "<ac:task-status>incomplete</ac:task-status>\\n<ac:task-body>$1</ac:task-body>").jsonEncode}}

Sidenote: It is pretty annoying that the / character does not need to be escaped (Which was screwing up my regex. *Sigh* ruined by too many years with ex/sed/perl. :-)

unknown

Hello @Matthew Ogrady

If you're open to a less technical solution, I’d like to suggest an alternative that can help simplify your process. Instead of manually resetting your action items every two weeks, have you considered using a Confluence checklist app?

If your recurring work happens on a fixed schedule, in your case it's bi-weekly, you can configure Didit Checklists to automatically generate a checklist based on a template at your chosen frequency. Additionally, you can assign tasks to specific team members, ensuring they receive notifications whenever a 'fresh' recurring checklist is generated.

This can be especially useful if you’re not on Confluence’s enterprise plan and have limitations on the number of automation rules you can run.

PS: As my badge suggests, I am part of the vendor team that created the app

Bill Sheboy

Hi @[deleted]

As a reminder...when recommending a marketplace vendor product, please ensure you disclose your affiliation to that vendor in your post wording. For more information about this, please see:

Atlassian Partners - Rules of Engagement

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/App-Central-articles/Atlassian-Partners-Rules-of-Engagement/ba-p/2899328

Kind regards,
Bill

unknown

Done

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