Confluence Question Macro is Flawed! Fails on hyphenated topics.
Asked by Shawn Connelly:

Every few weeks a colleague will waste time trying to make the Confluence Question List macro work... before asking me for help.  

The problem is with topics, "Separate each topic with a comma" and the fact that adding more than one topic, separated by a comma automatically employs an "AND" operator between each topic. In 99% of the cases that I've worked on, this was an undesirable behavior. Atlassian either needs to change this to a more useful "OR" operator, or even better, allow the end user to select the appropriate operator.

Thank you.


Answers:
author: Shawn Connelly
body: **Update!** After additional experimenting, I realized (or was reminded) of a bug that affects labels, tags, topics that have hyphenation.   

If the hyphen is replaced with an underscore, then the *Questions List* macro works and applies the "OR" operator.  

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comments: author: Shannon S
body: Hello Shawn,

Thank you for bringing this up. I just want to clarify this behavior with you.

First, you mentioned you were reminded of this bug, but I wasn't able to find the specific bug ticket you're referring to. Do you happen to have the link to that ticket?

From my understanding, you're having difficulty with any topics with an underscore (_) in the name when using the Questions List macro. However, if I create a topic with an underscore, I am not able to replicate the behavior you're seeing. It simply lists the items with the topic that I have entered (example human_resources).

In the Questions List macro itself, you can specifiy AND/OR using this selection:

![Screenshot 2019-07-10 at 14.02.23.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/60177iDB3E847E4C1BD41F/image-dimensions/354x163?v=v2 "Screenshot 2019-07-10 at 14.02.23.png")

If I have misunderstood your problem, please feel free to clarify, as well as providing screenshots of the issue and your Confluence and Confluence Questions version numbers.

Regards,

Shannon


author: Shannon S
body: Hello Shawn,

My apologies; I saw your other thread as well and noticed you are on the Cloud version of Confluence questions.

I am able to replicate this behavior only on the Cloud version and not the Server version, and discovered it is this bug:

* [CONFCLOUD-66339](https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-66339) *Not possible to search for topics with special characters in Questions List macro*

Please click **This affects my team** and you will automatically be updated when the issue is resolved.

I will be replying on your other thread in a moment so I thank you for your patience in this matter!

Regards,

Shannon


author: Shawn Connelly
body: Alternative solution is to place a search URL on the page, like this:  

https://++team++ .atlassian.net/wiki/dosearchsite.action?cql=space+%3D+%22++SPACE++ %22+and+type+%3D+%22ac%3Acom.atlassian.confluence.plugins.confluence-questions%3Aquestion%22+and+label+%3D+%22*label1* %22+**or** +label+%3D+%22*label2* %22\&search_id=dynamicID  

The one caveat to embedding this URL in a Confluence page is that the first click results in a "**Page Not Found** " error. One needs to select the URL and enter again to see results. I think the error is related to the dynamic search ID. :(  

At the very least, it would be nice to know how to avoid the initial Page Not Found error.  

Are there any other work-arounds to automatically list label specific Confluence Questions?  

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Thank you. :)


Tags: cloud

macro