Where to begin? Oxygen transform and automated upload to Confluence

Question

My friend is a technical writer and a veteran Oxygen user. She currently edits her documentation in Oxygen, and publishes it in PDF format and web help. The boss now would like to see the doc also published to a Confluence wiki. I'm trying to help my friend learn how to do that, but we're sort of stumbling around in the dark at the moment. I've looked through the Confluence user's guide but it doesn't seem to address the issues we're having or the questions we're asking.

I'm finding it a bit difficult to write a transform that satisfactorily converts her XML to Confluence's wiki markdown. Also, my brief forays into looking for doc on how to automate the process of pushing transformed stuff up to the wiki have been discouraging.

We're not sysadmins, and at her company, getting help from a sysadmin is problematic, so the more we can do as just regular users, the better. She's a doc person and I'm a programmer, but that's all the skill we have. We're not superstars. She's using the cloud version of Confluence, I guess that's 5.7 at this moment.

Could someone point us in the right direction? Like where to look for doc on best practices relating to transforming XML to Confluence wiki markdown (or is there a better way?), where to look for doc on programmatically uploading the material (because cut-and-paste isn't a good long-term solution, even if I can write a good transform)? At the moment she has put PDFs up on the wiki, but her boss would rather see actual text rather than a PDF he has to click on. We're brand-new to this stuff and are having a hard time figuring out where to start looking for answers. Thanks to anyone who can advise.

Elizabeth3 · Answer

Here's a plugin for going from Doxygen in Confluence - https://www.appfusions.com/display/DOXYGEN/Home Right now, it is pulling a compiled doc project; its not fully automated yet, but that will be next.

This is not exactly what you are seeking from Oxygen to Confluence, but same idea.

There's nothing available on the market that I know of currently to do this, but probably can be done depending on the structure of your source documentation.... Of course some variables to consider in this, to ensure proper output and automation. Happy to discuss offline to help you get to what you are looking for.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

Wiki markup is a convenience, a hangover from Confluence 3.x - it used to be the storage format, but it's moved to dynamic html, and the markup is just for formatting and us older people who still type in it.

For a transform, I think you've got a couple of routes.  First, export it to Word, as Confluence can import that directly.  The second option I think I'd chase is transforming the XML into JSON that you can use with the REST API to generate new pages.