Compiling Child Tables into Table on Parent
Asked by Josh Gilbert:

I'm looking for a way to compile a table on a Parent page that is made up of entries in tables on Child pages.

Here is my scenario: I have a Parent page on which I monitor the status of all tasks (in Child pages) via the Page Properties macros. We copy the page format for every new task (potentially hundreds of them, so Excerpt + Excerpt Include isn't feasible).

Each Child page also has a table used to track purchases related to the task, sometimes as many as ten rows of individual parts but always the same columns. Unfortunately, when I try to use the Page Properties macros to combine these all on to the Parent page, *it only copies the first row of the table and nothing else*.

Is there a better way to do this? Essentially I'm in need of a way to compile/filter all tables from children into one "summary table" on the Parent page, to track their status the way page project status is tracked with the Page Properties macros.

Perhaps I'm looking at the problem incorrectly? Any help is greatly appreciated, thank you!


Answers:
author: Natalie Paramonova [Stiltsoft]
body: Hi Josh,

If you need to pull multiple tables with multiple rows (both manually created or generated with the help of the macros outputting tables), you can use the combination of the [Table Excerpt Include](https://docs.stiltsoft.com/display/TFAC/How+to+use+Table+Excerpt+and+Table+Excerpt+Include+macros?utm_source=atl_community) and [Table Transformer](https://docs.stiltsoft.com/display/TFAC/How+to+use+Table+Transformer+macro?utm_source=atl_community) macros.

[Table Excerpt Include](https://docs.stiltsoft.com/display/TFAC/How+to+use+Table+Excerpt+and+Table+Excerpt+Include+macros?utm_source=atl_community) provides an ability to pull any tables from child pages, from specific pages, from pages by labels and more. [Table Transformer](https://docs.stiltsoft.com/display/TFAC/How+to+use+Table+Transformer+macro?utm_source=atl_community) merges all the tables in one.


author: Robert Reiner _smartics_
body: If you are looking for a tool to excerpt a number of fragments from a number of pages, you could look for a macro that supports multi-transclusion (or multi-excerpt in Confluence lingo).

The solution would be like this: Each table on the child page would be wrapped in a section (that is some kind of macro like the excerpt macro) and the multi-transclusion macro (on the parent page) would select these section(s) from all pages that meet a certain criteria ("being a child page" in your case). New pages would meet the search criteria and are added automatically. The result is a number of tables (probably all with different column widths) on one page. Maybe one of the add-ons Andrey mentions provides a tool to merge those tables (from his answer I would assume that)?

\[Edit\]: With version 2.1 the projectdoc Toolbox provides two table merging macros:

1. [Table Merger Macro](https://www.smartics.eu/confluence/x/TIDAB)
2. [Table Set Macro](https://www.smartics.eu/confluence/x/foHAB)

\[/Edit\]

If the multi-transclusion would be a practical workaround or one step to the solution for your problem, the commercial [projectdoc Toolbox](https://marketplace.atlassian.com/1212629) provides the [Transclude Documents Macro](https://www.smartics.eu/confluence/x/7ADe) to do this for Confluence Server.

Bias alert: I'm one of the authors of this add-on.


author: Andrey Khaneev _StiltSoft_
body: Hello Josh,

You can use Page Include or Excerpt + Excerpt Include macros to show all tables you need on a single page. Also you can use [Table Filter](https://docs.stiltsoft.com/display/TableFilter/How+to+use+Table+filter+macro?src=contextnavpagetreemode) or [Pivot Table](https://docs.stiltsoft.com/display/TableFilter/How+to+use+Pivot+table+macro?src=contextnavpagetreemode) macros to analyse this data.

comments: author: Josh Gilbert
body: Excerpt + Excerpt Include macros will require me to place a new macro for every new page created though, right? I want the compiling/merging of tables to happen automatically, as happens when using Page Properties macros....