How to track dependencies in Confluence

[pawel.kudzia]

Hi,

I'm considering moving internal documentation from self-hosted dokuwiki with few add-ins to Confluence. Content describes dependencies of different internal systems e.g.:

• service A depends on:
  • service X
  • service Y
• service B depends on
  • service X
  • service A

Each service has own page. I'd like that page to include automatically generated summary of depending/dependent services.

How can i add that type of information to Confluence? I'd like to add on service A that it depends on service X and do not have to mention manually on service X that it's required by Service A. Recursive resolution of n-th level dependencies is not needed.

In an ideal world i'd like to avoid any additional plug-ins to achieve this.

thank you!

[Andrew Darrant]

Hi @pawel.kudzia  - I am looking to do something the same - I was wondering what solution you came up with?

[pawel.kudzia]

i did not find any in confluence, we're using dokuwiki with data plugin and some custome PHP code.

[Shannon S]

Pawel,

Welcome to Atlassian Community. It's nice to meet you.

Could you let us know more about these dependencies and how they will work on Confluence? When you first described your requirements, it reminds me of the Excerpt Macro which you can use surrounding data you want to repeat on another page, using the Excerpt Include macro.

But I think you need a way to actually generate the list of dependencies, is that right? I'm having a hard time picturing what you're trying to do, so if you can be more specific, I might be able to come up with a solution for you.

Regards,

Shannon

[pawel.kudzia]

thanks for picking up this issue Shannon!

let's take more concrete example. i'd like to describe in Confluence multiple IT resources / processes we have running. 

* webs - web server with static content

* webd - web server with dynamic content

* db - database server holding blog posts

* blog - a blog visible to the public audience

* batch - batch job that produces fairy-tales

i'd like each of them to have own confluence page - that's straightforward.

then i'd like to document the following dependences

* blog depends on webs, webd and batch

* webd depends on db

* batch depends on db and webd

i'd like each of those dependencies to be described just on pages marked with cursive yet information about that dependency should show up automatically on all pages that are underlined.

after mentioning: on webd , batch that both depends db - i'd like page for db to automatically list webd , batch  as service that depends on db.

please let me know if my need is still unclear.

greetings,

Pawel

[Shannon S]

Hi Pawel,

That seems like you want to dynamically generate content in Confluence. This might be possible if you develop something yourselves, in-house.

Unfortunately, with Confluence Cloud, this makes things a bit more difficult, since you can't add your own scripts or write User Macros. You'll need to work on an add-on for something like that. I recommend starting by having a look at our Confluence Cloud developer site, and if you still have trouble, use the resources page to ask any questions.

I'm sorry that we can't help you better on this end, but it's a rather complicated task and it would be best suited for a development query.

Regards,

Shannon