Scroll Export and Orderly Database - Unknown error has occurred.

[Joe Crawford]

When using Scroll Exporter to export a page with Orderly Database macros it's not uncommon to see this error:

There were errors rendering macro:
An unknown error occurred.

It's fairly random, sometimes the Orderly Database will export properly and other times not. I've been told by K15t support that this is an issue with Confluence not properly loading the macros before the export. This seems to be confirmed true, because exporting using the built in PDF export by Confluence will sometimes produce the same error. That said, Scroll Exporter seems to be more susceptible to the error than the built in export which seems to fail less often.

I don't yet have a paid version of Confluence to open a ticket with support. So I'm hoping maybe someone else in the community has encountered the error and has found a workaround?

Or now that Orderly Databases is becoming an official macro in Confluence, maybe Confluence Support will see this and address the issue.

Any ideas? Anyone also having this problem?

[Brant Schroeder]

@Joe Crawford Are these large pages, take a little while to load?  I am wondering if the issue is you are exporting the page when the data is still loading.  Can you see if you wait longer before exporting if that fixes the error from happening.  

[Joe Crawford]

Hey Brant, thanks for the reply! Yes they are large pages, but unfortunately waiting for them to load doesn't help. I've allowed them to full load and even scrolled up and down the page to ensure everything is fully loaded, but still the error persists.

I think the export process doesn't use the content loaded on the page, but instead builds the content for export separately. I've been told by K15t support that during that process Confluence doesn't wait long enough before sending the content for export to the export plugin. :(

[Brant Schroeder]

@Joe Crawford Thanks for the additional information.  That makes sense.  I would suggest submitting a bug or feature request here: https://jira.atlassian.com/secure/Dashboard.jspa about extending session timeout.  

If what K15t support told you then all of the pages that are small would export just fine and without errors, has that been your experience?

[Joe Crawford]

Smaller pages are more successful, although it seems to be an issue on a per macro basis not so much a per page basis. For instance, a page with a single Orderly Database macro will almost always export correctly, but occasionally it fails. If you have a page with many of them, like I do, it's hard to get an export with all of them successful. With enough tries sometimes it happens. But once you get past 6 database macros it becomes nearly impossible to get an export with all of them working.

I didn't know I could submit a bug report as a free user, I will do that. Thank you!

[Brant Schroeder]

@Joe Crawford I am surprised that K15t has not done more with this.  It sounds like they should be recreating the issue on their end and making adjustments to how their app streams the export data or at least work with Atlassian on the issue as the vendor.  I would think that they would have had a lot of requests for this to be fixed unless no one is exporting their pages that have multiple DBs on them.  

[Joe Crawford]

I kinda felt the same way, but K15t support has always been pretty responsive and helpful, so I'm inclined to trust their comment that they can't do anything on their side to resolve it. It sounds like it's a limitation of the Confluence export API, but I don't have all the details.

[Joe Crawford]

After trying to submit a bug report it seems I can't do so as a free user. Hopefully one day our company will upgrade to the paid version.

I understand not offering tech support to free users, but I would imagine they would want any users to submit bug reports. Oh well. Hopefully the integration of Orderly Databases into Confluence as an official feature will draw attention to this issue.

[Brant Schroeder]

@Joe Crawford let me escalate to Atlassian and see if they have any additional insights.  

[Joe Crawford]

@Brant Schroeder Thank you! I imagine with Atlassian acquiring Orderly Database they would want to be aware that it doesn't play well with export. If you need anything further from me, please let me know. I'm happy to provide logs, examples, etc.