Suppress assignee and date in action items table description

[Nigel Brown]

Is there a way to suppress the assignee and date in the description field  as I have this info in the due date and assignee columns? I know I can remove those columns to not duplicate the data, but then I lose the ability to sort.

Thanks

[Katie A]

If you have access to the macro "Table Transformer", you can!

1. make sure you put all "Descriptions" you want to capture in quotes

    like-      [] "Description" @User //date

    (where [] is the checkbox icon)

LIKE THIS:

2. put your task report macro INSIDE of a table transformer macro.

3. In the table transformer macro, under "Presets" put "custom" and in "SQL query" put something like this:

SELECT
T1.'Task appears on',
T1.'Assignee',
T1.'Due date',
T1.'Label(s)',
MATCH_REGEXP(T1.'Description',"(?<=\")[^\"]*","u")
AS 'Description'
FROM T1

This is the result:

[Aaron]

Confirmed this works. Our organisation has the table transformer to be fair, but I wonder if this macro comes in a standard package as I haven't found that we have all of the 'bells and whistles' for our version.

I'd like to understand this part of the SQL query more, but I might resort to AI chat to explain it:

"(?<=\")[^\"]*","u")

[Katie A]

I'm glad it worked for you! 

---

Unfortunately I no longer work for organization that used this tool, so I don't know how to tell you about it being in a standard package or not. 

---

For the SQL query, that part is a regex (regular expression). Any time I need to make/understand them I just google them lol. The site I've used the most is regex101.com.

A cursory look tells me this:

There are actually 3 arguments to MATCH_REGEXP
MATCH_REGEXP(T1.'Description', "(?<=\")[^\"]*", "u")

• T1.'Description' - pulls the description field out (which has the undesired fields).
• "u" are the regex flags (on regex101.com it is the /"u" field after the regular expression. So on that website you would change the default "/gm" to "/u"
• "(?<=\")[^\"]*"
  • (?<=       - positive lookbehind, aka start looking after the next character
  • \"          - the next character to look behind, aka "
  • [^\"]     - capture a single character not present in the list, aka capture anything except "
  •  *          - do that zero to unlimited times
  • Summary - it will look for the first ", and capture all values until the next "

Hope this helps :) 

Here is a screenshot of what regex101 would give you to try this out:

[Stiltsoft support]

Hi @Aaron ,

The Table Transformer macro belongs to the app that we develop - Table Filter, Charts & Spreadsheets for Confluence. 

Here is the full list of the macros that we provide with this app. And here is a big section related to the Table Transformer macro (supported functions, use cases library).

If you have any other questions, please don't hesitate to contact our support directly - we'll guide you through the case.

[Alexis Robert]

Hi @Nigel Brown , 

the description column is actually a simple "copy" of the task description, it's not possible to only include some information here even if it's duplicated somewhere else.

You can have a look at the documentation here : https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/add-assign-and-view-tasks-590260030.html

If you do need more flexibility for tracking tasks, I would suggest looking at Jira : this way you can configure exactly what's displayed in the Jira Issues macro in Confluence, and it gives you more configuration options.

Let me know if this helps, 

--Alexis

[Nigel Brown]

Thanks Alexis, thought as the other two columns were able to include only specific parts there may be a way, but it’s not a major issue, just not a fan of duplicating info but I’ll just have to get use to it 🙂

Thanks again

Nigel