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Empty macro browser (no custom macros)

Sergei Dorogin

I have Confluence 5.7.1 with Confluence Questions 2.0.10.

I have disabled "Spaces Home Page" module and some other plugins/modules related to JIRA. Nothing related to core functionality as I can understand. But it hard to catch as it's very cumbersome to find all disabled modules in "Manage add-ons" page.

Anyway I have a trouble: in macro browser I can only see one macro - "Code Block". Nothing more. When I installed a plugin for adding some additional macro (youtrack-confluence-plugin) it's disabled right on installing with the following record in Conf's log:

2015-07-20 22:39:15,357 INFO [http-bio-10.20.12.102-83-exec-10] [atlassian.plugin.manager.DefaultPluginManager] disableDependentPlugins Found dependent enabled plugins for uninstalled plugin 'youtrack.integration.plugin': [].  Disabling...

2015-07-20 22:39:15,357 INFO [http-bio-10.20.12.102-83-exec-10] [atlassian.plugin.manager.DefaultPluginManager] notifyPluginDisabled Disabling youtrack.integration.plugin

It's not an issue with the plugin as it works fine on a fresh setup of Confluence+Question.

Moreover I guess that having only a single macro it's strange. It seems that all other macros are disabled. So how can I understand what did happend with my macros?

Accepted answers

Steffen Opel _Utoolity_

information This answer does not address your issue with the youtrack-confluence-plugin.

Empty Macro Browser

The lack of macros in Confluence Questions seems to be the 'by design' state of affairs - you can verify this behavior in this very instance that is driving Atlassian Answers, where the editor offers the well known Autocomplete keyboard shortcuts, for example:

'[' - opens the regular Confluence 'Link suggestions' dialog
'@' - opens the regular Confluence 'User suggestions' dialog, for example to invite @Sergei Dorogin into a conversation
'{' - opens the regular Confluence 'Macro suggestions' dialog, except for offering a lone Code Block Macro indeed

Hidden Macro Support

However, as demonstrated right here, it is possible to use many (all?) regular macros via copy and paste - that is, you can edit the macro on a standard Confluence page (another instance also works) and copy it into the Confluence Questions editor once done - this is neither officially supported nor fully functional though:

The regular inline macro 'Edit'/'Remove'/... toolbar shows up, but simply yields an error message that There is no metadata configured for this macro which means no configuration screen can be presented here.
Similarly, I could have just copied the Summary of autocomplete table, which likewise reveals the regular but dysfunctional table editor toolbar, so this might be one reason to hide this feature still - this is tracked via https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CQ-1170.

Rationale

According to Bill Arconati's resp. comment on CQ-697, this is not a bug but is by design, i.e. it seems to be a deliberate decision to only offer a stripped down editor with limited formatting functionality.

Personally I consider it a bit odd (though highly welcome - please don't take that away!) to support an undocumented list of macros via copy and paste, yet not offering to insert/edit the very same macros from scratch. One rationale might be to provide a more streamlined initial user experience and obstruct usage of advanced formatting for the uninitiated - however, as suggested by the mentioned limitations, it might also just be a pragmatic way to exclude officially unsupported and/or broken macros for the time being.

Ultimately this is for Atlassian to answer of course, which is why I'm using another helpful hidden feature to insert a few links to related JIRA issues via copy and paste, resulting in them to be rendered as nicely as in Confluence:

All comments

Steffen Opel _Utoolity_

information This answer does not address your issue with the youtrack-confluence-plugin.

Empty Macro Browser

'[' - opens the regular Confluence 'Link suggestions' dialog
'@' - opens the regular Confluence 'User suggestions' dialog, for example to invite @Sergei Dorogin into a conversation
'{' - opens the regular Confluence 'Macro suggestions' dialog, except for offering a lone Code Block Macro indeed

Hidden Macro Support

The regular inline macro 'Edit'/'Remove'/... toolbar shows up, but simply yields an error message that There is no metadata configured for this macro which means no configuration screen can be presented here.
Similarly, I could have just copied the Summary of autocomplete table, which likewise reveals the regular but dysfunctional table editor toolbar, so this might be one reason to hide this feature still - this is tracked via https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CQ-1170.

Rationale

Sergei Dorogin

Thanks you so much @Steffen Opel [Utoolity]. I should check macros in this instance indeed, my bad. Also thanks for the tip with copy/paste but we use CQ only for q&a and it doesn't have spaces/pages, just quesions (like this instance).

As for "by design" I'm just shocked. I spent so much time trying to figure out what is broken in my installation. And all this was useless. Thanks to a "briliant" Atlassian's desicion "to provide a more streamlined initial user experience".

Steffen Opel _Utoolity_

@Sergei Dorogin - I feel your pain, it is indeed very frustrating to debug things only to find out that it is a well known but non obvious limitation. Please note that I just speculated about Atlassian's rationale though, there might well be a good reason for excluding those features, notably that they simply haven't found the time to prioritize them (doesn't mean that the limitation could not be better communicated of course, for example by including a respectively prominent note directly in the macro browser). As for copy/paste: in case you have access to a Confluence instance elsewhere, this should also work, I have copied the samples from one of Utoolity's own instances for example - I have updated my answer in this regard, thanks for pointing out the insufficient phrasing.