Confluence should support including ANY page property

[ToBe]

Especially for use in "child pages" (e.g. options) for respective "parent pages" (e.g. decisions), I may want to include some property of the parent page in some page property value of the child.

Example: Assume you have a page property called prio at each parent page and also at each child page. However, the value at the child pages you really want to be computed as: <parent-prio>.<child-prio>, so you can neatly sort on that column later.

Now, what you don't want to do at all children is to manually enter the value for <parent-prio> and keep that updated whenever the parent prio changes. Instead, you want to be able to include said property from the parent and display its current value at the child.

Beyond custom page properties, including standard properties of a page should also be supported, e.g. labels, creator, created, modified, modified, excerpt, etc...

In other words, I am asking for some more powerful macro than "Excerpt Include", e.g. some "Property Include" where the Excerpt is but one of the (standard) properties that are supported.

In any case, thanks for an awesome wiki system.

[Sven Schatter _Lively Apps_]

I think you are right. There's a lot of potential value in Page Properties that can currently not be utilized...

I remember that some time ago we had a similar use case. So we built a plugin for ourselves, as we wanted to be able to use the values of our Page Properties directly inside (inline) of our text. Meaning, we wanted to create something like "template pages" that have page properties like "Customer Name", "Customer Address" etc. which could then be inserted with the help of a macro.

The idea was that with this feature we would be able to easily generate PDFs for something like contracts that have certain values automatically filled in (via the Page Properties). And we also wanted to do what you described with the parent/child hierarchy. E.g.: Multiple contracts for the same company would all be children of the "ACME Contracts" page which would have page properties like "Company Name" and "Company Address" which could then be reused in all the child pages.

I was actually able to dig up some old screenshots:

Now, on Server you can of course build something like that or get an app from the Marketplace that solves this problem, but we evaluated this for Cloud as well and came to the Conclusion that a macro like this would not be possible there (or would be strongly restricted feature-wise). I think this was also more or less the reason why we decided not to go to the Marketplace with it (yet).

But, yeah: Page Properties are definitely not getting enough love.

Cheers,
Sven

P.S.: I absolutely love your name!!!