Search by author and date
Asked by Jim Ryan:

I need to somehow generate a list of documents by author last modified before a certain date. The purpose of this is to give this list to the respective authors to have them review the documents for current accuracy and relevance. Is there any way to accomplish this?


Answers:
author: Stephen Deutsch
body: All is not lost... I'm not sure which version of Confluence you are using (it makes a major difference as far as advanced search syntax, so I wish community made you input it when you ask a question).

I think you can insert the author's name in the "By" box, choose "Pages" under type, and then search for the following:

```
modified:[* TO 20161229]
```

Please note that the date format is YYYYMMDD and it is important that TO is in capital letters.

If you are using Confluence 5.4 or earlier, then you can use the following search syntax:

```
modified:[* TO 20161229] AND type:page AND creatorName:<username>?
```

where \<username\> is the user's username in Confluence.

comments: author: Jim Ryan
body: You make a great point:

License Information for Confluence {#toc-hId-1762830533}
--------------------------------------------------------

### Confluence 5.7.3 {#toc-hId--985839933}

Copyright ? 2003 - 2013 Atlassian Corporation Pty Ltd.

The use of this product is subject to the terms of the [Atlassian End User Agreement](http://www.atlassian.com/end-user-agreement), unless otherwise specified therein.

This product includes software developed by the [Apache Software Foundation](http://www.apache.org/).

This product also includes the following libraries which are covered by the GNU LGPL license:

* Atlassian Hibernate 2 Extras ([com.atlassian.hibernate:atlassian-hibernate2-extras:4.1.1:jar](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-2.1.txt))
* atlassian-image-consumer ([com.atlassian.image:atlassian-image-consumer:1.0.1:jar](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-2.1.txt))
* c3p0:JDBC DataSources/Resource Pools ([c3p0:c3p0:0.9.1.2:jar](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.txt))
* CSS Parser ([net.sourceforge.cssparser:cssparser:0.9.5:jar](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.txt))
* hibernate ([hibernate:hibernate:2.1.8-atlassian-28:jar](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-2.1.txt))
* image4j ([org.jclarion:image4j:0.7:jar](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.txt))
* jcaptcha-all ([com.octo.captcha:jcaptcha-all:1.0-RC6:jar](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.txt))
* jStyleParser ([net.sf.cssbox:jstyleparser:1.16-atlassian-1:jar](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.txt))
* jtds ([net.sourceforge.jtds:jtds:1.2.2:jar](http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html))
* PDF renderer - Atlassian patched (pdf-renderer:pdf-renderer:1.13-atlassian-6:jar)
* Streaming API for XML ([javax.xml.stream:stax-api:1.0-2:jar](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt))
* syntaxhighligher ([1.5](https://code.google.com/p/syntaxhighlighter/))
* TinyMCE-TinyMCE ([3.4.3.2-atlassian-3](http://sourceforge.net/projects/tinymce/))
* xhtmlrenderer (org.xhtmlrenderer:xhtmlrenderer:8.5-atlassian:pom)

This product also includes code written by other third parties.

Additional details regarding these and other third party code included in this product, including applicable copyright, legal and licensing notices, are available in the "licenses" directory under the Confluence installation directory.


author: Jim Ryan
body: OK, that worked! Nice. Do you have a good search reference for this version?

Jim


author: Tom Clement
body: I also couldn't solve the problem this way. However I was able to solve the problem for me by creating a page under my "Your Space" area, then add the "Recently Updated" macro. It allows you to specify one or more authors in the "Author(s) by username" field. Choose the '@all' space. Under "Include these Content Types Only", I entered *page* , then increased the number of results to *400*. That's results per page, so you can still load more, but since I was looking at over 1000, I wanted a big page size. Works well.


author: Jim Ryan
body: ![Capture.JPG](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/6292i9CB6CDBC6FD1BED6/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "Capture.JPG")


author: Stephen Deutsch
body: Sure, this is possible. First, open a blank search page by clicking within the search field in the upper-right and pressing enter.

On the search screen,

* Under "Last Modified", choose "Custom" and in the "To" field, put in the date until which you would like to have the documents for (so 3 months ago would be the 15th of June, for example)
* Under "Of Type", choose "Pages"
* At the bottom, click "Add a Filter", choose "Creator", and then input the name of the author that you want to filter by.

These steps can be performed in any order. The results will be the list of pages created by a particular author that was last modified sometime before the specified date.

comments: author: Jim Ryan
body: Stephen,

Thank you, but unfortunatly, which is often the case, I don't have a lot of these options. No "Custom", no "Add a Filter". Is there another way to skin this cat?

![Capture.JPG](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/6291iBB7B20C3C9EEB549/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "Capture.JPG")


Tags: search