Jira Work Items regression: no row limit, nested scroll bar, heavy pages

Question

Affected

Jira Work Items macro, Confluence Cloud (cloud editor)

Background

We use Confluence pages as project status dashboards. Each page contains up to 7 tables, each showing the 5 latest Jira work items of one sub-project (JQL ... ORDER BY created DESC, maximum 5 issues) in a compact table. This worked perfectly with the Jira Legacy macro. The Jira Work Items macro cannot provide the same result.

Problems

* There is no "Maximum work items" option. The macro renders the entire result set with incremental loading instead of the top N.
* The list sits in its own fixed-height container with an additional inner scroll bar: a scroll area inside an already scrolling page.
* It takes far more space than the old compact table.
* Reporter and assignee are rendered as avatar images instead of plain names, which adds visual noise and page weight.
* With up to 7 macros per page, pages become extremely heavy and slow to load.
* There is no plain or compact table mode comparable to the legacy macro.
* JQL has no LIMIT clause (JRACLOUD-68133), so the result cannot be limited on the Jira side either.

Requests

* Add a "Maximum work items" (top N) option to Jira Work Items, applied after the JQL ORDER BY, fetching and rendering only N rows, with a matching storage format parameter.
* Add a compact display mode: plain-text names instead of avatars, no inner scroll bar, table height fitted to its content.
* The automatic conversion from the Jira Legacy macro discarded our "Maximum issues" settings. When the option from request 1 is available, please restore these limits automatically on all converted macros, so we do not have to edit hundreds of tables by hand.
* We cannot create public feature requests ourselves. Please create CONFCLOUD suggestions for requests 1 and 2 (or link existing ones) and send us their keys, so we can vote on and follow them.

Business impact

Our project status reporting in Confluence is effectively broken. Static selection of work items is not an acceptable workaround, because the dashboards must update automatically.

Tomislav Tobijas · Answer

Hi @Aleksandr Duk,

Just to add to Arek's response, another option worth exploring is the (relatively) new Home dashboards. 👀

Additional support reference: Create and manage dashboards

They offer more flexible reporting and allow you to combine Jira data with Confluence content through Smart Links.

It won't directly address the missing row limit or compact display options, but it might be worth considering as an alternative approach to your project status dashboards. 🤔

Cheers,

Tobi

Arkadiusz Wroblewski · Answer

Hi @Aleksandr Duk,

Atlassian has already acknowledged several limitations following the Jira Legacy macro conversion.

There are existing requests covering your issues:

* CONFCLOUD-77380 – Maximum number of displayed work items.
* CONFCLOUD-84475 – Height and scrolling.
* CONFCLOUD-84532 – User avatars instead of text.

Unfortunately, we're fellow Community members, not Atlassian Support, so we can't resolve the migration issues.

I'd recommend contacting Atlassian Support to investigate your specific case.

Cheers,

Arek🤠🧙‍♂️