Auto populating Databases
Asked by Christofer Strasz:

I was excited to see the addition of Confluence Databases to Confluence cloud. In experimenting with it though, I found that my top use case isn't supported unless I'm misunderstanding how to use it.

There are examples shown where you can see a grid view of all documents with their respective status (Draft, Under Review, Approved). What I was hoping to do was make the database table auto populate based on the criteria of labels so that we can see a list of designs that are not approved.

Right now, it seems like you need to add every page manually, which isn't really sustainable long term and requires every author to know to add it to the table. Are there plans to extend DB functionality to auto populate based on queries?


Answers:
author: Levente Szabo _Midori_
body: [@Christofer Strasz](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/5477537) Based on what I read on the topic, auto-populating any value is not a direction Atlassian is taking with Databases. Having to manually add values to the DB and also manually setting statuses are both blockers for larger teams. I think the only reliable solution is one that automates as many updates as possible.

As for Confluence page status management and reporting, [Better Content Archiving](https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/123/better-content-archiving-for-confluence?hosting=cloud&tab=overview&utm_campaign=gh&utm_medium=cac-comment-2673262&utm_source=cac) is a go-to-tool for many years to

* automatically [apply statuses based on precise (CQL-defined) rules](https://www.midori-global.com/blog/2023/04/28/confluence-page-status?utm_campaign=gh&utm_medium=cac-comment-2673262&utm_source=cac)
* use more than the built-in 5 statuses (up to 20!)
* have an overview of the statuses using a page status macro:  
  ![better-content-archiving-content-status-list-macro.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/318775i84AF7E25BEECE8F6/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "better-content-archiving-content-status-list-macro.png")
* or a by looking at an overview of contents in all statuses across your spaces:  
  ![content-status-overview-cloud.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/318776i66622B216B693C4A/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "content-status-overview-cloud.png")

What's more, you can explore more advanced [Confluence page view statistics and usage analytics](https://www.midori-global.com/blog/2024/03/19/confluence-page-analytics?utm_campaign=gh&utm_medium=cac-comment-2673262&utm_source=cac) with dashboards. It's like Confluence Analytics but enriched with content lifecycle management details and made available for all tiers, not just Premium and Enterprise.

*(Please note that I'm part of the team developing Better Content Archiving.)*


author: Kristian Klima
body: Hi [@Christofer Strasz](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/5477537) and welcome.

I'm using the Databases with the same intent as you :)

Here's a[link to my article on the subject](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-articles/Use-Databases-for-your-docs-life-cycle-management/ba-p/2663479) - it includes a link to a short video on how to get all your pages into a database.

Sure, after that you will have to add new pages manually but at least the beginning is not impossible.


Tags: cloud

confluence-cloud

database

db