Can I store metadata in HTML tags in Confluence?

[Giorgos Flourentzos]

Hello! I am creating pages on Confluence programmatically using the REST API. I need to store some tables that I need to retrieve (using an XML parser) and update later. In order to tell which table is which, I am trying to store attributes to the HTML tags in Confluence, but Confluence seems to drop them when saving the page content.

For example, when I send Confluence this

<tbody tid="a-very-specific-table">
	...
</tbody>

Confluence accepts it but later on when I retrieve the page the table drops the attributes I gave it:

<tbody>
	...
</tbody>

Is there a way to store my own attributes or otherwise tag a table with some metadata so that I can retrieve it later?

Many thanks in advance!

[Davin Studer]

This is not ideal, but you could try something like this and I think it should work.

<div>
	<span style="display: none;">
		meta data here.
	</span>
	<table>
		...
	</table>
</div>

[Alex Medved _ConfiForms_]

Hi,

What if when you create you page, you try to wrap your custom attributed tables in a HTML macro

<ac:structured-macro ac:name="html">
<ac:plain-text-body>
<![CDATA[
 
TABLE here
 
]]>
</ac:plain-text-body>
</ac:structured-macro>

will this work or still will strip-off your custom attributes?

[Giorgos Flourentzos]

My XML parser would not even allow me to do that in the first place because it's missing Confluence's namespace and XML descriptions. Even when I try to parse a confluence page that has <ac:...></ac:...> tags in it, it strips them off. (https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/11455197/)

[Alex Medved _ConfiForms_]

just wrap it as string value before sending to REST API... you do not have to work with this as with XML. or the actual problem is with reading it back?

[Giorgos Flourentzos]

well, I need to parse it as XML first, edit it, then stringify and put it back. It's meant to be a programmatically updated page.