😲 New Rule Validations, New Lookup Pages Action, New Template, and New Template Categories!!!

[#1]

👋 Community - Avinoam from Confluence Automation here once more and this time with not one, not two, not three, but four new announcements 📣 🎉

New Rule Validations

As of earlier this week we released a new capability directly into the rule builder that will essentially act like on the fly guardrails to help make sure you create compatible rules that will accurately execute as you intend them to instead of having to look through the audit log and figure out why they may have failed. Next time you start to add a component, in certain cases, you'll see that by default the components you're shown are only compatible ones to help guide which components are compatible for the creation of predictable and accurate rules.

As you can see in the example below, when you use the Scheduled trigger and then select the action to carry out, you can see that by default only "Compatible actions" are selected. Of course, you can still filter out actions based on all actions or any other available filter or search as always.

New Lookup Pages Action

What is this component? Similarly to the Lookup issue action in Jira, the new Lookup pages action in Confluence takes a CQL search and saves the result (up to 150 pages) to the smart value {{lookupPages}}, which you can use in other components in your rule (or branch).

Now you can search for up to 150 pages based on their author, creation date, and when they were last updated, and include the results list in other actions by using the {{lookupPages}} smart value (you can learn more about smart values with page lists).

New Manual Triggers Template

When we first released manual triggers we included a template for it ("

Publish page with label and create Jira issue"). Now we've added a second template which also leverages the new transition and edit of Jira issue actions as well!

It's called "(Manual trigger) Change page status with comment and transition Jira issues" and you can find it in the Templates tab in Automation for Confluence.

When saved, and when an end user executes this manual triggers it will automatically change the Confluence page status and the related Jira issues status accordingly, and will finally add a comment to the Confluence page noting the reason for the change.

New Template Categories

Last but not least, as we've nearly tripled the amount of available templates in Confluence Automation over the past few months, we refreshed the template categories to make them easier to find and to better match their purpose and value when deciding which one to use for creating your Confluence Automation rules.

Before the change we had two categories which were Organize and Approvals and nearly all out templates sat under Organize.

Today we have four distinct categories:

1. Organize - to help you maintain a source of truth
2. Cross-Product - to help you drive cross product work
3. Collaborate - to help you drive productivity for your team
4. Notify - to help ensure the right people are in the know

When it all this be available?

These are already available to all Confluence Premium and Enterprise customers!

We want to hear from you!

We’d love your feedback so please feel free to schedule time with us directly here or drop a comment on this post 

[Laurie Sciutti]

👏🏻

[Dan.Tombs]

Amazing news on the manual trigger @Avinoam I also absolutely love the idea of the lookup pages stuff. With more and more smart values coming to A4C, I think some great automation rules will be able to be made.

[Nikki Zavadska _Appfire_]

I just used the new rule builder, and it's looking really good 🔥👏

[Valentina Mannara]

What about this feature on DC versions?

Thanks

[Robert Klohr]

While I welcome the continued progress in Confluence Automation, the Lookup Pages feature, in contradiction to what is stated in this article, does NOT support CQL but instead is limited to a set of three hardcoded (Author, Created, and Last Updated) values.

Is there a plan to support CQL for Lookup Pages similarly to how Jira supports JQL for Lookup Issues? Is there an issue where we can watch and vote on this enhancement?

[Shawn Doyle - ReleaseTEAM]

I like the lookup pages but it is missing some key functionality.  I agree with @Robert Klohr that being limited to those three values makes this less useful.  I would love to be able to just enter CQL.

However, in the near term it would be great to be able to search for things like "less than x days" or since yesterday, or less than a week.  Right now I can find things created in the past, like older than 1 day, but not select things since yesterday.

There are probably dozens of use cases, could we we get support for the basic date operators?

[Erin Manuel]

@Avinoam  Do you have examples of constructing a rule using the Lookup action? The screenshots provided don't help much.

Please help us help ourselves. This announcement is bare bones.

[Darryl Lee]

Ohai. Yeah, I took a look at the Lookup action and ugh, as @Robert Klohr and @Shawn Doyle - ReleaseTEAM correctly pointed out back in January and May, the "Lookup Pages" feature does NOT support CQL, despite what @Avinoam wrote in the original post:

New Lookup Pages Action

What is this component? Similarly to the Lookup issue action in Jira, the new Lookup pages action in Confluence takes a CQL search and saves the result (up to 150 pages) to the smart value {{lookupPages}}, which you can use in other components in your rule (or branch).

CQL search? Oh really?

Hum.... I wonder if that's a feature that got dropped, because this later part of the post is accurate:

Now you can search for up to 150 pages based on their author, creation date, and when they were last updated, and include the results list in other actions by using the {{lookupPages}} smart value (you can learn more about smart values with page lists).