Confluence - How to to link to current version not current page?
Asked by Polychronia:

Hi, I want to add a link (for example from a JIRA ticket) to my current documentation. But when I take the link from the page it always links to the current page of the document, so when the page is changed the JIRA ticket links to the latest version of the page (with the new changes) instead to the version of the page when I created the link.

A workaround is:

After finishing the documentation in Confluence I will make another useless edit of the page, so that a new version of the page will be opened. Then I go to the page history and take the link next to the last one.. But this is really annoying.

Is there another solution for this?

Thank you,

Marco


Answers:
author: Karin van Driel
body: Hi Marco,

Get the link to the page, this should be in the form of the page name, e.g. <https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/ALLDOC/Atlassian+Documentation>, you then follow that with a question mark, then pageVersion=x, where x is the version you are interested in. So an example:

<https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/ALLDOC/Atlassian+Documentation?pageVersion=1>

That will give you the first version of that page. So just go to your page history, see what version you are on now and put that version in there.  
Please note the case of the word pageVersion; it only works if you write it exactly like that, so lower case p, upper case V.

I hope that helps :smile:

Cheers,

Karin

PS Confluence does not deal well with special characters in the page name, so in order for the link to contain page name rather than ID, make sure there are no brackets, ampersands etc. in the name of the page, otherwise you get a page id for linking only and that will not work for current version, as you have already discovered...

comments: author: Elisa Blaga
body: Hi Karin

I'm running your Confluence cloud solution, but I can't get the pageVersion linking to work. It just gives me the newest version of the document no matter what version I write:  
<https://XXXX.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/XXXX/pages/XXXX/Release+changes?pageVersion=2>

Hope you can help me out.

Best regards

Jens


author: Karin van Driel
body: Hi Jens,  

We are using a Server instance of Confluence and a fairly old one at that, so something may have changed in the way things are structured in the three years since I posted the above answer.

This definitely worked fine, even in the cloud, at the time I wrote this, as I tried it with the confluence documentation; the links I posted above worked at the time.  

Not sure why Atlassian would have removed the capability and it is somewhat concerning as we are planning an upgrade to the latest version; I hope it will maintain the links we have in place following the upgrade...

I guess a way around it is to link directly to the ID of the page in the history you are after. Here is a link to page history in the Confluence Demo instance:  

<https://templates.atlassian.net/wiki/pages/viewpreviousversions.action?pageId=33111>  

Find the version, right click and copy the link. This should then give you a link direct to the document at that version.

e.g. version 2 - <https://templates.atlassian.net/wiki/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=112031>

I'm not sure if that will suit your use case, but I hope it helps. I would also suggest maybe reaching out to Atlassian to ask them what has changed and if there is perhaps still a way to use the page versions in the URL directly, if that is something that you still need.  

Good luck,  
Karin


author: Karin van Driel
body: Hi,

Looks like my replies are disappearing...?


author: Karin van Driel
body: Trying again...  

Hi Jens,

We are using a Server instance of Confluence and a fairly old one at that, so something may have changed in the way things are structured in the three years since I posted the above answer.

This definitely worked fine, even in the cloud, at the time I wrote this, as I tried it with the confluence documentation; the links I posted above worked at the time.

Not sure why Atlassian would have removed the capability and it is somewhat concerning as we are planning an upgrade to the latest version; I hope it will maintain the links we have in place following the upgrade...

I guess a way around it is to link directly to the ID of the page in the history you are after. Here is a link to page history in the Confluence Demo instance:

<https://templates.atlassian.net/wiki/pages/viewpreviousversions.action?pageId=33111>

Find the version, right click and copy the link. This should then give you a link direct to the document at that version.

e.g. version 2 - <https://templates.atlassian.net/wiki/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=112031>

I'm not sure if that will suit your use case, but I hope it helps. I would also suggest maybe reaching out to Atlassian to ask them what has changed and if there is perhaps still a way to use the page versions in the URL directly, if that is something that you still need.

Good luck,

Karin


author: Elisa Blaga
body: [@Karin van Driel](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/752991) Yeah, I couldn't find it again either, but I can see it in my inbox :D Thanks for your answer, I will create a new question about it in here.


author: Karin van Driel
body: Oh good, I thought I was going mad there for a second... ;)   

Looks like it took on this last attempt.


author: Andy Heinzer
body: [@Karin van Driel](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/752991) Sorry about that, the site's spam filter incorrectly flagged your messages as spam, I have added them back to the thread, but I will remove one of the duplicates.


author: Karin van Driel
body: Thanks Andrew,

I had managed to get it to stick, so we still seem to have a duplicate, feel free to remove that one :)