Deleting Live Attachments

[Rob Havlovick]

We were using this app to clean up some of our spaces, and we have discovered it's deleting live attachments. The only config tweak is we were going Space by Space, so we had entered each space name. We have stopped using the app as it's not reliable, and we no longer trust this app.

[AlutusTech]

Hi,

What do you mean by “live attachments“? If these attachments were actually referenced in a page or blog post, in which way were they referenced? Through some macro?

Can you provide the storage format of the page where these attachments are present?
You could send it by email to [e-mail].

Thank you,
Teodor

[Rob Havlovick]

They were Gliffy Diagram’s (a plug-in for Confluence) that were embedded in pages. Immediately after we ran the Unused script, several people submitted tickets saying that their Gliffy Diagrams had been removed.

When you say the storage format of the page, what does that mean exactly? I’ll be happy to provide more info tomorrow!

[AlutusTech]

Hi,

The storage format is available in the … (3 dots) menu on the top right corner of the page.
But we don’t need it anymore as you already confirmed you are using a Gliffy macro.
You see, there are many macros out-there in the Confluence world, which reference attachments in their own different ways and when we scan the page content we can only look for standard macros that come with Confluence default installation, such as attachments macro, space attachments macro and gallery macro:
http://alutustech.com/confluentis_unused_attachments.html

However, our plan is to introduce support for popular known macros such as Gliffy, as we heard about it before. We need to write a piece of program that looks at a Gliffy macro configuration and checks which attachments it uses. Our current understanding is that a Glify macro references its own specific files attached to the same page, but at this point we cannot exclude the possibility of Gliffy macro referencing attachments from other pages and spaces, so we need to fully understand how these macros work and introspect them correctly.

If you use other macros making use of specific attachments, we’d have the same problem. We simply cannot anticipate which macros are used and how they work and in this respect, our plugin is indeed imperfect.

We can only add support for third-party plugins one macro at a time.

Until then, one way to get around this is to make use of labels to mark attachments or pages that need to be excluded from the list of unused attachments.
If the Gliffy macro imports diagram files with certain known file extensions such as *.gliffy, *.gon or *.gxml, you could also exclude them from the results using file name patterns.

Thank you,
Teodor

[AlutusTech]

This issue has been solved in the new 2.0.4 release which handles Gliffy and draw.io macros to mark and introspect the attachments they create and reference.