Introduction

These are a set of utilities to assist administrators support their instance.

Features at a Glance

Feature	Description
Actions By Space	A utility to empty the trash, search and replace text or fix anonymous access for a space or a group of spaces.
Active Users List	Lists out the users who can use Confluence and when they last logged in.
Entity Authorship Rest Interface	A rest interface that enables a user to set the author and creation date of piece of content.
External Directory Sync Rest Interface	A rest interface that triggers all of the external directories to start synchronizing.
Space Inventory	Lists out the actives spaces, their size and last update.

Features in Detail

Actions By Space

Description

The Active by Space view provide four utilities that can be used to execute a task for a space or a group of spaces identified by a common space category.

Replace Text: Used to replace a string with another for all pages in the space. The original text is defined by a regular expression.

Empty Trash: Used to empty the trash for a space or multiple spaces.

Fix Titleless Pages: Used to find and fix pages that do not have a title.

Fix Anonymous Access: Confluence gives Space Administrators the ability to grant more permissions to the user name Anonymous than regular logged in users. This can be very confusing to users as they can lose the ability to view content once they log in. This utility discovers (and can correct) situations in which the group or groups used to identify all the users that can use Confluence have less access than the user Anonymous.

Usage

In the Confluence Administration view, there is a section in the left sidebar for Keysight Admin Support. Clicking on the link Actions by Space is in that section will bring up the view. Each view provides detailed instructions on how to identify spaces, run a trial and then to execute the action.

Purpose

Replace Text: There have been several situations where some widely known piece of information (such as the url for Confluence) changes. This utility has been helpful to update the content in Confluence once without having users manually update lots of pages.

Empty Trash: There have been times we wanted to empty the trash across all of the spaces with a space category. This just makes the process easy.

Fix Title-less Pages: Most people will never have a need or use for this utility. In our instance we had a defect with a Space Blueprint that created a number of home pages with no title. From what I can tell, it's impossible to fix the issue without a tool like this or using SQL directly against the database.

Active Users List

Description

This provides two list of users who 'can use' Confluence. One of users who have never logged in and another for user who have logged in at least once. The later also shows the date when they last logged in and how many days ago it was.

Usage

In the Confluence Administration view, there is a section in the left sidebar for Keysight Admin Support. Clicking on the link Active Users List is in that section will bring up the lists.

Purpose

Before the self-registration system was introduced, users needed to manually request access and wait a day or more for that access to be granted. Managers would therefore often request access for groups of people upfront who might someday possibly need access to avoid any delays introduced by the access control process. As we had a limited user license we found ourselves needing more seats but knowing that a large number of the registered users were not using Confluence. This view was used to help us see which users were not actively using their allocated seat so it could be given to another person who needed access.

Entity Authorship Rest Interface

Description

This is a rest interface that can set the set the author and creation date for a piece of content.

Usage

URL: <confluence-url>/rest/entity-authorship/1.0/content

Input Parameters: space-key, page-title, content-id, attachment-title, creator, creation-date

Post a query to <confluence-url>/rest/entity-authorship/1.0/content with the following parameters:

content-id: the id of the content
creator: the username for the person who should be credited with authoring the content
creation-date: the date when the content was first created (format is MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS)

Alternatively, you could provide the space key and page title or the space key, page title and attachment title.

space-key: The key of the space containing the target content
page-title: The title of the page whose metadata is to be adjusted or that the attachment is attached to
attachment-title: The title of the attachment whose metadata is to be adjusted. Only used if targeting an attachment.
creator: The username for the person who should be credited with authoring the content
creation-date: The date to set for the creation date (format => MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS)

Purpose

This was developed to help with importing content from a TWiki site. When adding pages and attachments via the rest interface, the author and creation date are those of the current user and the current time. We used this interface to keep the original authorship and creation date for the imported content.

External Directory Sync Rest Interface

Description

This is a rest interface to trigger the synchronization of all of the external directories. It will not restart a sync is one is already underway for that directory.

URL: <confluence-url>/rest/confluence-support/1.0/directory/sync Input Parameters: none

Note, this interface does not check for any credentials. Therefore a simple get call to the url will trigger the sync. From a security perspective, this would allow somebody to learn the names of the external directories as defined within Confluence. As it will only start a sync that Confluence is doing anyway on a regular basis there did not seem to be much value in trying to protect this operation and not protecting it made it easier to integrate with a self registration system and not have to worry about password synchronization.

Usage

Use a web browser, curl, or something like get go query the url at <confluence-url>/rest/confluence-support/1.0/directory/sync

Purpose

In order to avoid a manual process for granting users 'can use' rights to Confluence, we put together a website where users could enter their Active Directory credentials and be added to the AD group with 'can use' rights. We initially had Confluence syncing up every 5 minutes, but that turned out to be excessive. So we slowed the sync rate down to 120 minutes and used this rest interface to trigger a sync when a user was added to the 'can use' group. To assist with this system, the pageNotPermitted.vm and notPermitted.vm templates in Confluence were replaced with ones directing users to the self registration page. All together this proved to be a very quick and labor free system for granting users permissions when our Confluence license was substantially smaller than our corporate user base.

Space Inventory

Description

Provides a list of the spaces, the number of pages, the last time content was modified and a simplified view of the permissions (Admin Access, Read/Write access, Read Only Access).

Usage

In the Confluence Administration view, there is a section in the left sidebar for Keysight Admin Support. Clicking on the link Space Inventory is in that section will bring up the inventory view.

Purpose

This is intended to help Confluence Administrators track the inventory of spaces and identify spaces that may be good to archived as they have not been updated in a long time.

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