Experience with confluence databases

[Erik Mathijs]

Confluence databases is a great feature but ...

I have only worked with it on a very small scale and limited, but there are already a number of very annoying hickups. Seems to me to be more of a beta version to be honest. Here are the first / biggest / most important problems that I encountered, and for the time being I have limited myself to the most important basic functionalities

• Doing “add entry” at the bottom when searching for something at the top right does not show the new entry in the view you have (IT-technically logical, but as a user I still expect to be able to start filling in that new empty entry)
• Doing “add entry” at the bottom when no search or filter was active adds a new row somewhere. I thought above or below the row where a field was selected, but after some trying it seems to be somewhere in the middle, somewhere random, where I changed something last time, ..? In any case, the DB scrolls all the way down, where the new row is definitely not. Then you have to start scrolling until you find an empty row somewhere
• Typing text in a field is very slow. When you first start it's not too bad, but when you're busy for a while the memory fills up or something. Then I can type, and every +/- second all the letters I type are added
• My rows have a date field on the far left, the rows are sorted by date. If I enter a date in an empty row, that row immediately jumps to the correct place in the order. But the pop-over with the date selector jumps to the top left corner, and it won't go away unless you refresh the page, or do something else that refreshes the view
• If you just entered text in a cell, and then you click on the search box at the top right to search for something, I suddenly type back in the field that was selected. Even if I click on the search box again, sometimes 2, 3 times in a row, and then it works anyway
• A text field has problems with a number of “special” characters that seem quite normal to me: “ ‘ & there are already 3 of them. If you enter it like that it seems to work correctly, but if you open the DB later they are converted to a ?. I understand that you cannot save arrows or smileys. But when I type “UUIDs” I think it is a pity that it becomes “UUID?s”

I promote the use of confluence databases in our confluence environment but still experience quite a few issues

[Emoke Mozesne Csikos]

Yes, adding a new entry and finding the empty row is difficult. I also struggle with this every day.

My workaround: I created a view for entries that have a specific field empty (in my case it is the title which is usually filled in first, so it is rarely empty) and I can see the new, empty row in this view. I can start filling in all fields, but leave the title field on which the filter was based on for last. When I fill it in, the new entry disappears from this view.

[Erik Mathijs]

Nice workaround

Just hope that the atlassian team comes with a solution.

[Emoke Mozesne Csikos]

A small refinement to this: if I expand the new entry, I can even add the title first. Although the entry disappears from the view, the expanded view of the entry stays open and I can continue filling in the rest of the fields.

[Olie Ryan-George]

Seconding the stuff about adding new rows when searching, filtering or sorting!

[Jack]

All really good points and experienced them also. Many users complain to me that when they add rows they just disappear. I then tell them to scroll to the bottom. Often, we find multiple empty rows at the bottom as people tried repeatedly to add a row and not realising they were created off screen.

Suggestion to Confluence: Just add the new row below or above the current position in the database. The user can refresh the database if they want so to show it ordered correctly again. Or something else, but whatever is the least interruptive to workflow. You don't want to be jumping around all over.

[Sarah S Allis]

That first point really tripped me up when I was doing some testing. It took me a bit to figure out why it wasn't generating an empty row after I'd filtered the database. Of course, it was creating a new row, but if I'm using a filtered view on a page because those entries are related to the page content, a user would logically expect to be able to add new rows related to that content right there.