Confluence page versioning with included content?

marty0801

I love Confluence's page versioning system, especially the ability to annotate what has changed whenever a new draft of the page is saved. I also love the ability to include content from other pages using, e.g., "excerpt include". 

Regrettably these two systems don't seem to work well together. For example, suppose page A includes page B, and that page A is currently on version 1 (in its page history). Now suppose I make a change to page B. This will result in a (potentially unintended) change to version 1 of page A, a change that is not tracked in page A's "page history". Thus it seems that page A's content can change without those changes being reflected in its page history. 

I'd prefer to ensure that the current version of page A remains static when changes to page B are made; and that changes to B be included in A only when a new version of A is saved. Is this possible? 

Thiago P _Atlassian Support_

Hey there @marty0801 ,

What you described makes sense, but not possible with the current implementation.

Some background: the Storage Format used to keep a page's contents will add text, tables, images, attachments and other static contents while keeping versions between changes. When macros such as the 'Excerpt Include' come into play, that renders content dynamically, so the actual macro contents are not stored directly on the page.

While it's technically possible to achieve this, the 'Excerpt' macro currently does not implement versioning (such as with Attachments). The suggestion filed for this is CONFCLOUD-74686 but it was closed due to low engagement.

The Workaround for this is to copy contents from the source page and paste them directly into the page as this will guarantee page contents remain unchanged.

Hope this helps!  =]