Confluence Wiki Markup Search and Replace
Asked by Gavin Fowler:

With the recent introduction of Confluence 4.0, I've taken a look at some of my user macro's. Many are very basic and were thrown together and should really be reworked. The trouble i have is, if i make substantial changes to the way these macro's work (change structure, name, fields, body), how can i quckly / easily retrofit these changes back into the pages that use these macro's. I'm talking a small number of macro's used 1000's of times across multiple spaces.

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I had a quick look here (altassian answers) and in the plugins library, but nothing jumped out that would suit my confluence 3.5.11 (production) or confluence 4.0.0 (pre production testing) installation. I'm happy to apply the change to any installation (assumes i don't roll 4.0 into production any time soon).

Any worked suggestions / advice much appreciated.


Answers:
author: Jean de Laulani?
body: Hi there,

you can use this plug-in <https://plugins.atlassian.com/plugin/details/162> not officially compatible with v3.5 but by adding the backport jar file, it will work just fine.

be careful though it's quiet powerful, i believe you can use regex to narrow down your search.

i've used it in the past to change user macro names accross several spaces.

cheers,

comments: author: Gavin Fowler
body: A late follow-up (i orginally just used the solve button), but to help others. Jean's solution worked perfectly well. I took the advice, in the link he gave, and embeded the recomended back port into the plugin jar file and then uploade the plugin into confluence. It solved my issue for bulk changing a user macro that was used 1000's of times across 20+ spaces. my version of confluence at the time was 3.5.11.


author: Sven
body: Just to add that one possibility is to configure a drive for WebDav-Access. Each page is then a folder with a \*.txt-file containing in storage format the content of that page.

Using a text editor (like Notepad++) and the option "Find and Replace in Files" (include subdirectories) I was able to do some extraordinary useful patches...


author: Sherif Mansour
body: Hi Gavin,

In relation to find/replace text, we are looking at implementing that in the near future: <https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-2522> However in your case, you want to find/replace macros, I haven't heard of that request too often. A cheap/hacky workaround might be some database scripts to find/replace, although that might be a bit risky.

comments: author: Gavin Fowler
body: Thanks for the feedback Sherif, the link you embeded results in a Jira error "Project Not Found". I'm assuming it's a permissions thing. Any idea on the timeline?

I'm asuming i will have upgraded to confluence 4.0 before any new features (such as search and replace) are introduced. Do you think the search and replace your referring to will have the capablities to find and replace Confluence version 4.0 macro notation / markup??

Thanks


author: Joe Clark
body: There's a period/full-stop at the end of the URL which is breaking the link. - I've fixed it now


author: Barbara Green
body: Would there be any hope of getting this to run in 5.3.1? I have the same issue with user macros and we are trying to clean up data.


author: AM
body: Please check:  

https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/21735/occupy-confluence-markup-provide-a-wysiwyg-xhtml-markup-editor-to-edit-the-markup-source-of-confluence-4-wiki-pages

A-M


Tags: markup

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