These are the content properties you’re looking for: Confluence Connect integrations and CQL

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The Confluence platform team has been building more ways for your Atlassian Connect add-ons to integrate with and extend search in Confluence. We’ve added Connect support for CQL query aliases and the ability for your add-ons to integrate with search filtering. Initially announced at AtlasCamp 2015, these awesome new features allow you to get the most out of content properties.

Let’s recap. What are content properties?

Content properties are a way to store key-value pairs against a piece of content in Confluence. They allow your Connect add-ons to store associated JSON directly in Confluence using the REST API, removing the need for a backend server for static add-ons. Where they get really powerful is when they’re used in conjunction with CQL, allowing you to filter your search results using the data you previously saved on the page.

Cool! What are the new features?

Aliases

One of the best things about content properties is the CQL integration. Defining your own search indexes allows you to hook into Confluence search and grab content based on the information you’ve previously saved as a content property. For example, you might have saved a calculated ranking in every Confluence page, and you want to pull up pieces of content based on that. This is what that CQL query might have looked like before:

Now, with aliases, that can be simplified down to the query below, just by adding a single alias field to the definition of your content Property.

How do I use them?

In the definition of your content Property in your atlassian-connect.json, use the alias field to define a simple name to refer to that property by. It should look something like this:


    { 
        "key": "content-properties-rank", 
        "name": {
            "value": "Rank"
        }, 
        "keyConfigurations": [ 
            { 
                "propertyKey": "myAddonRank", 
                "extractions": [ 
                    { 
                        "objectName": "value",
                        "type": "number", 
                        "alias": "rank" 
                    }
                ] 
            }
        ]
    }

For more context on how these work, head over to the Atlassian Connect documentation on aliases.

User interface support

To extend the support for filtering content, we need to integrate it into lots of different places in Confluence. We want to be able to filter content not just as developers querying the REST API, but also provide that capability to end users. With UI support, you can add powerful search filters based on your content properties to any existing macros that aggregate and display content, e.g. the content by label macro. For example, say you had saved a ‘category’ property for each piece of content on your Confluence instance, and wanted to display content filtered by this property:

In addition to enhanced macros, your filters will also show up in the search screen, allowing users to refine their search queries.

How do I use it?

Defining the uiSupport object in your atlassian-connect.json provides the information needed for Confluence to include it in all the CQL UI filtering locations available, such as enhanced macros and the search screen. The defaultOperator field decides what will be used as a comparator in the UI, while the dataUri defines an endpoint in your add-on which returns a list of valid values for this content property.


    "confluenceContentProperties": [ 
        { 
            "key": "content-properties-category", 
            "name": { 
                "value": "Category"
            }, 
            "keyConfigurations": [ 
                { 
                    "propertyKey": "myAddonCategory", 
                    "extractions": [ 
                        { 
                            "objectName": "value", 
                            "type": "string", 
                            "alias": "category", 
                            "uiSupport": { 
                                "defaultOperator": "=", 
                                "dataUri": "/rest/semantix/category", 
                                "valueType": "string", 
                                "name": { 
                                    "value": "Category" 
                                } 
                            } 
                        } 
                    ] 
                } 
            ] 
        }
    ]

One more thing… the content property toolbar

In addition to building these new features, we’ve also put together a developer add-on to improve the process of working with content properties while working on your Connect add-on. This allows you to quickly see the state of content properties set in the current page, without having to do a cURL call to the REST API each time you want to check them. You can grab the content property toolbar from Bitbucket.

You can also get more information on these new features and how they fit into the Confluence Platform by checking out  Ben Mackie and Matthew Jensen’s talk from AtlasCamp 2015. Head over to the content property documentation to get started!