How do we disable a built-in macro?

Question

We want to disable or hide the legacy view-file macro that was used to view PDFs.

Atlassian support seems to be saying this is impossible. User macros have management options to restrict to certain groups, add a category, etc. Built-in macros seem to have none of these.  Macros that are installed by plug-in can be removed in a group by removing the plug-in.

The functionality of the old PDF macro has been replaced and superseded by the new PDF file viewer in 5.7, so to be honest, we're not sure why they left the old one in there in the first place.

But any help on removing a macro? They have to be stored somewhere... can they be deleted from the admin side?

Luiz Maia_v4bla4 · Answer

Hi Chris,

However not suggested, the PDF macro can be disabled. This macro is part of the Office Connector Plugin.

Go to the Manage Add-ons page, change the search filter for "System Add-ons", find the Office Connector Plugin and disable it.

Please note that both the Office Connector Plugin and View File Macro will be discontinued soon. The View File Macro will already no longer exist in Confluence 5.9. We now suggest the usage of the new Files and Images Macro feature.

Thanks.

Regards,
LM

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

Well, you could disable the module (within the add-on) that provides "view file", but that has a couple of problems.

First, you'd be disabling all the view-file possibilities, not just PDF.

Second, there may well be shared code - if you turn off view-file, you might lose all the PDF functions because the code that reads PDFs is all in there and other modules just call it.  (I don't think this is the case, but it might be)