Scroll Ignore in Tables
Asked by Sariya Hanz:

Is there a way to apply a scroll ignore macro to entire rows or columns of a table? We use Confluence for our release notes and format them as a table. Some information is internal-only and it would be helpful to have those columns auto-hidden upon export, so our clients don't see erroneous information that isn't relevant to them.


Answers:
author: Thomas Rough _K15t_
body: Hi [@Sariya Hanz](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/3739023)

As Bill has already stated, there is no way to do this with our macro. If you nest the whole table within the the Scroll Ignore macro you can ignore all of this content in the export but it cannot be specified that a certain row/column in a table is ignored.

Therefore, if you need finer control over what sections are printed and which are not included in the export, I would also say that using standard content on your page and using the Scroll Ignore macro (where needed) would be the best approach.

Regards, Thomas (K15t)


author: Bill Bailey
body: I know of no way to do this. And any kind of workaround is extremely limited in the Cloud version.

You may have to change your release note methodology, as I think you have painted yourself into a corner by using tables. Part of this reason is due to how tables work in HTML. cells are objects wrapped by another object to for rows, that are then wrapped by yet another element to make a table, with columns define positionally and at the highest wrapper. In other words, cells are not objects that can be recombined and separated at will.

comments: author: Sariya Hanz
body: That makes complete sense, and that was my gut feeling. Thanks for your response, [@Bill Bailey](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/502089)


author: Steffen John
body: Hi Bill,

What is your suggestion instead of using tables? We use the page properties macro, and that requires a table too, right? Now I have the same requirement as Sariya where I would like to exclude certain properties from the Scroll Export.

I tried generating a page properties report where I can exclude some of the properties. But now I'm facing a different challenge because I have lots of page properties containing the same kind of information and now they're all joined together in the page property report.  
To get the separate tables that I need, I understand that I need to insert multiple page property reports and give each of them a unique ID, corresponding to the page property macro? That would be a lot of work.

I still have some liberty of restructuring my original data, so if you have a better idea than tables, I'm all ears.

Thanks,  
Steffen


author: Bill Bailey
body: Our release notes are done as standard content (headings, paragraphs, etc.). Maybe follow the same scenario and then using Scoll ignore macros to hide content.


author: Steffen John
body: Thanks. We'll discuss switching away from page properties.

Feels weird though to be limited like this. This is not to criticize Scroll PDF but it's rather a painful limitation of Confluence in my opinion. Like "Here, have some structure where you can organize your data. But we won't give you the tools to properly access that data." Not even a \*\*\*\*ing proper Java API. Just an inofficial one where you can only query but not update data as far as I could see.


author: Bill Bailey
body: No sure what limitations exist with Cloud, but the REST API is read/write. For example, some of our documentation (for commands) is generated outside of Confluence from the source code, then pages are added/deleted/updated via Python script.

Also, with user macros (again on the server), you can manipulate (get/set) JAVA objects in Confluence.


Tags: cloud

confluence-cloud