Editing Confluence Databases in edit/view mode

[Matthias Gaiser _K15t_]

Hey team,

I love that I'm now able to edit a Confluence database also in the edit mode. Well done!

As others stated buried in different threads though, it's not possible to edit the database in the view mode anymore. Is this an intentional change? It was so nice and simple to use before.

If it is intentional, can you please elaborate about the reasoning?

Cheers,
Matthias.

[Divya Sriram · Accepted solution]

Hey Matthias,

Glad you're finding the ability to edit databases in edit mode useful. 

We wanted to ensure that the editing and creation experience consistent across Confluence. For all millions of Confluence users, being able to edit in view mode would be deviating from the existing experience today.

But @Matthias Gaiser _K15t_ more importantly, I'd love to learn what about being able to edit in view mode was most helpful to you? Specifically:

• Do you have pages with just databases in them or databases and other text? If it's databases and other text, you'd have to go into edit mode to make changes to text anyways so would this experience be more consistent with that?
• When you were editing in view mode, were you making updates to existing content (ie: change a status or tag) or were you adding new rows and columns and changing the structure of the database?

Thanks for the immediate feedback and would love to learn more!

[Matthias Gaiser _K15t_]

Hey @Divya Sriram

thank you for the fast reply - and I also understand why editing in edit mode instead of the view mode makes sense, just thinking about the naming.

What was helpful to me about editing in view mode?

I described in this post briefly our CRM use case where we have one page for one company. On this page we have all contacts and interactions for this company grouped together - so it's basically mainly databases on this page which are linked/filtered accordingly.
With the edit in view mode, it was easily possible to add new contacts/interactions or edit existing ones. What I liked about this, that I only saw the relevant information because it's already filtered for the company.

That's the main reason I can think of. Changing the structure is fine for me in edit mode because that's not what I do that often.

[Divya Sriram]

@Matthias Gaiser _K15t_ - that's helpful! So editing in view mode is most helpful when there's a single databases that's accessible to many people and the goal is to update this database which view mode is helpful for while changing the structure of the database can be done in edit mode. 

Thanks for this feedback!

[Elle Longwell]

Just want to pop in to emphasize that this was also important for us. I certainly see why this was changed, and I see the value there as an option, but removing the old functionality entirely is certainly inconvenient in some areas. The removal of the ability to add a new entry without editing the entire page is also a bit inconvenient, as we heavily use these databases as the starting point for essentially all of our confluence documentation. We basically never actually used the core database page and instead have a dedicated page with the full database macro so that it can sit logically within our Confluence sidebar navigation alongside other pages.

Additionally, we've found this change to be a bit counterintuitive since it only partially works similarly to how a normal confluence page edit works. The main issue here is that it's caused us to lose quite a lot of work since it leads us to follow the natural page editing/publishing flow, but doesn't remove the additional requirement to "save" within the database macro as well. Before, it was obvious that we needed to save the DB entry since we weren't in a page editor, but now that we have to be in the page editor, it is counterintuitive to have to save in two separate places (and in the correct order at that).

[Matthias Gaiser _K15t_]

+1 to what @Elle Longwell said. If you keep the edit in edit mode, it's quite essential for me to get rid of the extra save button inside the macro. I've read the same complaint inside our company today that someone wondered why their changes get reverted - and they also simply didn't press the save button in the macro, but the publish on the page.

@Divya Sriram I'm not fully sure if you got my point since you were talking about a single database.
Editing in view mode is especially helpful for me on pages where I embed multiple database macros from different databases which relate to each other. On the view mode, I can see all data which are related to each other and can adjust them. There's not much content on the page I need to edit otherwise.

Here's a simplified example:

On the top is the main db entry of the company from the companies database - and below are other databases embedded which filter for the company, but allow to easily view and edit contacts of this company. Further down on that page, we have embedded other databases for interactions (meetings/calls) or promo codes.

Hope that gives some more insights.

[Sigrid H]

I also agree that while it is a consistent UX to keep all editing options in the edit mode, the problem with the edit mode is that if I just want to make a quick adjustment, say update the page status or a status macro or so on, it requires a lot of time since the edit mode takes long to load, especially with many macros. And then publishing again takes a lot of time. It would be so convenient to just click on a table entry and update the status and then just save this quickly without all the loading interference. Also, using the browser navigation to go back is very inconvenient with the edit mode, since I need to go back through the edit mode.