Pasting an URL to a Confluence page renders a representation that is clickable. If the URL points to an issue on a connected JIRA instance, this link is automatically converted to a macro that links to the issue. The feature responsible for this is Autoconvert for pasted Links.
One advantage is that the extension will fetch the page and render the title (HTML title or DC.title - if present) of the referenced document as label to the link.
Without projectdoc Autoconverter
Source Code
The rendered link in view mode
Rendered
The rendered link in view mode
Without projectdoc Autoconverter
Source Code
The rendered link in view mode
Rendered
The rendered link in view mode
The title information is fetched from the page the URL is linking to.
HTML Fragment with HTML Title
HTML Fragment with HTML Title
HTML Fragment with Dublin Core Title
HTML Fragment with Dublin Core Title
Dublin Core for Confluence?
If you want to add Dublin Core or other metadata to your Confluence pages, have a look at Add HTML Meta Tags.
Base Link
The main purpose for autoconverting a link to a macro is to make moving servers much more easy. If you are working with information systems in a team and write documentation that heavily links to these systems, changing the location may be a major pain for updating all links in your Confluence instance.
DNS anyone?
This problem can be easily removed by employing a Domain Name System or DNS, but our experience is that often teams do not provide such a system for their internal, often ad-hoc installed infrastructure.
Add-on to extend the projectdoc Toolbox to integrate remote information systems.
Configuration
You need to specify the remote information systems you want to enable autoconvert as space properties.
For this example we assume that autoconvert should be enabled for Wikipedia.
Open Space Homepage for Editing
Navigate to a space home page where you want to enable autoconvert.
Use the Index Space
Since this is often a site-wide decision, consider to set the properties in the index space.
Note that the Delegate Space property allows to define parent pages where the index space the the root of all spaces.
Add Wikipedia URL
To add a remote server add the url-wikipedia-en space property.
This introduces the information system wikipedia-en (without the url- prefix) and specifies the root URL to the information system (which may or may not be a link by itself).
Enable Autoconvert
Not every URL you specify should be considered for autoconverting. Therefore you need to inform projectdoc that this new URL is actually to be a base URL for autoconverting by the use of the space property Autoconvert Hint.
Multiple values are separated by comma. Note that you specify the system ID wikipedia-en you specified in the previous step. Also note that projectdoc needs to know how information is autoconverted. In our case it is linking, therefore we add ":link".
Check Configuration
Paste an URL to a page on Wikipedia in edit mode of a page in your Confluence and check that your configuration is correct!
Note that property names and values need to be free of any additional HTML envelopes! If you copy & paste values from an HTML page, there may be additional div or span elements around those values.
If you think everything should be all right, have a look at the page with the Confluence Source Editor or delete the lines and type them manually (without copy & paste).
