projectdoc Toolbox 1.11 Release Notes

Property Supplier Macro, Placeholders in Space Properties, Transclusion from Confluence Pages, Extension Support, and Heading Level for Sections

Today we released version 1.11 of the projectdoc Toolbox on the Atlassian Marketplace!

projectdoc is an add-on for Confluence supporting agile software development teams to collaborate on process, project, system, and product documentation. 

New and Noteworthy

The following changes may be the most interesting of this release.

Property Supplier Macro

With this version it is now very easy to specify document properties in separate tables. This makes it possible to group properties semantically and show them on different locations of the page.

There is still one Document Properties Marker Macro required, but there can be any number of additional Document Properties Supplier Macros. The author is still responsible to make sure that each property is provided only once.

Document Properties as Data provides a tip on using the Document Properties Supplier Macro.

Placeholders in Space Properties

It is now very easy to references space properties within a space property value. Just use ${name} where name refers to another space property.

A typical usage scenario is to define the version of a product and reuse this information within other space properties.

url-scm=https://bitbucket.org/smartics
project.artifactId=smartics-projectdoc-confluence-space-core
project.version=5.1.0
url-download-sources=${url-scm}/${project.artifactId}/get/${project.artifactId}-${project.version}.zip

Using Space Properties provides tips on working with space properties.

Extension Support

We have learned that users of the projectdoc Toolbox are overwhelmed its the features. While being feature rich is a good thing, overwhelming is not. Therefore we decided to move some of the core features to extensions. This way users can better decide which features they want to install and which not.

With this release the support for information systems integration and for Maven moved to extensions.

Information Systems Extension
Add-on to extend the projectdoc Toolbox to integrate remote information systems.
Maven Extension
Add-on to extend projectdoc for Confluence with Maven Tools.

Both extensions are free to use and installed as additional add-ons to the required projectdoc Toolbox.

Information Systems Extension

Due to the introduction of placeholders in space properties, referring to resources on remote information systems is now much easier. Macros that solely provided means to construct URLs out of several parts are now deprecated and will be removed with one of the next releases.

The most important feature of this release is the support for autoconversion. Every URL that is defined as an external resource will be automatically converted to a macro. This makes it very easy to replace the base URL to an information system in case the system moved to another location.

For more information on working with remote information systems, please refer to Information Systems Extension.

Maven Extension

The Maven Extension provides tools to create spaces and pages based on artifact information. Currently information is read from POMs, buildmetadata, and Maven Plugin Descriptors.

Transclusion from Confluence Pages

Prior version of the projectdoc Toolbox required the transcluding and the transcluded page to be projectdoc documents. With version 1.11 both ends of the transclusion may now be Confluence pages. That is: neither page needs to have the Document Properties Marker Macro.

Heading Level for Sections

With this version of the projectdoc Toolbox the starting level of sections can be configured per space. That is: the team may decide whether the titles of the top-level sections are rendered as h1 or h2.

The rendering is controlled by the space property Heading Starting Level.

Control on Name Selection

The Name List Macro now allows the template author to restrict the selection of names. By configuration of the macro the user is aware to choose only one value or values from a given range.

  • PDAC-630 - Force User to select one Property Value Done
  • PDAC-631 - Force User to select from Value Range Done

Breaking Changes

The following changes are incompatible with the previous release.

Doctype Add-on Update required

Due to  PDAC-631 - Force User to select from Value Range Done  it is required to update the doctype add-ons for the projectdoc Toolbox.

Removed Macros

The information systems macros have been moved to their own extension.

Maven Services Removed

The Maven services have been moved to their own extension.

List of Changes

The complete list of changes for this release.

The following changes are part of the latest projectdoc Toolbox for Confluence.

Key Summary T P Status Resolution Description
PDAC-639 Replace with Space Properties for Blueprints New Feature Critical (migrated) Done Fixed

Allow to replace placeholders in form fields with space property values.

PDAC-637 Template Replacer Service New Feature Critical (migrated) Done Fixed

Provide a service via HTTP that allows template authors to replace placeholders in input for form fields.

PDAC-635 Transclusion from Confluence Pages New Feature Critical (migrated) Done Fixed

Most macros of the projectdoc Toolbox only work with projectdoc document. While it is not difficult to transform Confluence page to a projectdoc document, new users typically do no know this constraint. When they try the toolbox, they will almost immediately fall into this trap.

Therefore we should enhance the error messages once a user tries to use macros relying on the Properties Document Marker Macro. And we should enhance macros to actually deal with Confluence pages. The Transclusion Macro is one of them. While there are features that can only be provided by accessing document properties, others should work (maybe with some limitations) without.

We should allow transclusions from sections and content regardless of the transcluded source entity is a Confluence page or projectdoc document.

PDAC-634 Document Property Supplier Macro New Feature Critical (migrated) Done Fixed

Provide means to add properties for a document not only by the Document Properties Marker Macro.

We want to make it easier for document authors to group properties and add additional text for these properties. While we looked at document properties mainly as metadata, allowing to separate and display these properties will make it easier for authors to deal with properties as content (not only metadata).

Authors are responsible to ensure that no property name is used more than once.

PDAC-624 Allow Placeholders in Space Properties New Feature Critical (migrated) Done Fixed

Allow to simplify referencing space properties in space property values. Use the

${property-name}

syntax to resolve references.

PDAC-622 Extract Information System Macros New Feature Critical (migrated) Done Fixed

Move all macros that access information on remote servers (per link or transclusion) to its own extension.

PDAC-620 Space Property for Section Heading Starting Level New Feature Critical (migrated) Done Fixed

Sections should allow to define the base level of sections if the level is set to '*'. Currently the system assumes the level of 1, but a variable selection would make it easier for teams to switch between h1 and h2 based documents.

PDAC-644 Support Creation Tracking New Feature Major Done Fixed

Creating spaces and pages with plenty of subpages takes a considerable amount of time. Therefore we need some infrastructure to track the advancement of these processes to display them to the users.

PDAC-642 Render Link for Display Table And Transclude Documents Macro New Feature Major Done Fixed

Links are typically rendered with the name of the document. The name is always rendered in the result table.

For some use cases it is not appropriate to render the name in the table.Therefore we need controls to render a link to the document the information is transcluded from.

One is to render the heading as link. But since this might not get well with every style guide, we also need to specify a label that is rendered after the short description (if present) and before the table of properties.

PDAC-636 Refresh Tree Action Supports Changes Bottom Up New Feature Major Done Fixed

Using the Refresh Page Tree Action changes of page properties are only propagated from a page down to its children. This feature enables the propagation in both directions.

PDAC-631 Force User to select from Value Range New Feature Major Done Fixed

The Name List Macro (and the Tag List Macro) allow users to specify arbitrary values and does not force to select from a predefined value range. While it is a valid use case to allow arbitrary values we should allow the template author to force the use of a range.

If the author selects a value out of range, the value is simply rejected.

PDAC-630 Force User to select one Property Value New Feature Major Done Fixed

The Name List Macro (and Tag List Macro) have no control on the number of values to choose. A common use case is to require only one property to be set.

Therefore we should add a parameter that limits the number of valid selections to 1.

We should discuss if a max value would support more use cases ("choose up to three!"), but this would probably make the UI more complicated for the default use case.

PDAC-626 Configure Property Table Rendering for Index Cards New Feature Major Done Fixed

Allow to configure the mode for rendering the properties of a index card. Currently it is only possible to render a plain table. We need to allow to pass in a CSS class and allow to choose between table and definition list style.

PDAC-623 Add Where to Index Macros New Feature Major Done Fixed

Add Where Parameter to Index Macros to select on result sets.

PDAC-619 Support XHTML Properties in Wizards New Feature Major Done Fixed

Properties that are rendered as raw XHTML have to be normalized. This is especially relevant for values containing character entities like "clever & smart".

PDAC-640 Improved Context Provider API Improvement Critical (migrated) Done Fixed

Provide a support class to help keeping the Context Provider API more stable.

PDAC-212 Support Transitive Property Updates Improvement Critical (migrated) Done Fixed

The update is currently not transitive and therefore document properties that reference document property values transitively do not get updated.

PDAC-641 Allow to Suppress Transclusion Box for Display Table Macro Improvement Major Done Fixed

Currently there is no option for the Display Table Macro to suppress the rendering of the transclusion box. It should be available since otherwise users may only switch the rendering off on space-level.

PDAC-621 Extract Maven Dependencies Improvement Major Done Fixed

To reduce the dependencies and therefore shrink the size of the OBR we remove the Maven dependencies and move them to their own extension add-on.

PDAC-625 Right-align Counter Columns Improvement Minor (migrated) Done Fixed

Tables rendered with a counter column should right-align the counter value.

PDAC-633 Role List with no Permission fails Bug Major Done Fixed

The Role List Macro runs into a NPE if no permission is set on a page.

PDAC-629 Blueprint Wizards for Type do not check Form Input Bug Major Done Fixed

The type doctypes experience level, module type, resource type, and topic type do not check the form fields when creation a doctype instance with the blueprint wizard.

PDAC-628 Transclusion Box Link Name not resolved Bug Major Done Fixed

Rendering the transclusion box for documents without a plain name fails. If the name contains macros, the name is not resolved.

PDAC-627 Property Fetching includes Parent Pages Bug Major Done Fixed

The property fetcher not only fetches from the current document, but also from its parent pages. There are no semantics to fetch from the parent pages and therefore we should only return the document properties from the document itself.

PDAC-643 Counter Column interferes with Column Rendering Bug Minor (migrated) Done Fixed

When a column is configured to render e.g. center aligned, switching on the counter column influences the column locator. The render options are then applied to the column left of the specified one.

PDAC-638 Missing Support of HTML Entities for Section Macro in Edit Mode Bug Minor (migrated) Done Fixed

The Section Macro does not support HTML entities in its placeholder image diplayed in edit mode.
Create a new section a document which contains HTML entities in the title:

Save macro and stay in edit mode:

Resources

Release Notes for the projectdoc Toolbox
Relevant information on changes to the projectdoc Toolbox for Confluence introduces by new versions of this app.
Glossary
Terms used in and defined for projectdoc.
FAQs
Questions and answers related to the projectdoc Toolbox and Confluence.