Our customer is General Direction of Information Technologies of Republique et Canton de Geneve. This direction works closely with Department of Security and Economics (DSE) and develops products for the government and their business objectives. This team works on the changes required for information systems of the Geneva administration. Usage of Atlassian products provides team members with quick and reliable information update, circulation, storage and distribution in the single ecosystem. Choice of Confluence was not accidental, as this system allows all team members to instantly get updates on any changes in the data bank and be aware of all modifications made in the information systems or site infrastructure.
But aggregation of information is also followed by expansion of stored data, which becomes quite inconvenient when you deal with this. Here comes data filtration that allows you to narrow the list of information matching your current criteria. Unfortunately, Confluence is not equipped with the filtration engine. This does not allow you to efficiently manage your data in the table and filter it depending on your actual needs. As a solution they decided to use Table Filter add-on developed by StiltSoft, the Atlassian Verified Vendor and Atlassian Expert.
The customer adjusted work of the add-on in company with other add-ons generating tables based on some reporting parameters or criteria.
Table of Contents
The customer uses two ways to add pages in Confluence:
- Confluence blueprint templates, but they change the label name to match the pre-defined sample;
- Pages created with Scaffolding add-on. The customer uses the Reporting add-on from ServiceRocket to generate the report on added pages.
Sometimes instead of using the report-on macro from Service Rocket, they use the native Confluence macros – Page Properties and Page Properties Report. These macros are used as replacement for the report-on macro because of ease to use.
Structure of Confluence page usually looks like this:
Table Filter is used here for filtration of pages by author or label, or other parameters within the Page Properties macro. Table Filter add-on allows the customer to filter tables by means of drop-down filters, free text filters or the global filter with filtration throughout the entire table. Optionally, the customer can hide the unnecessary columns, use the regular expressions for filtration or filter multiple tables at once.
Filtration of automatically generated tables
Administrators can also generate reports on Confluence pages by means of SQL for Confluence add-on from Bob Swift. This is used primarily for internal use and tracking utilization of Confluence spaces and their size or generating reports on administrative and statistical content. Here Table Filter add-on is a real helper that allows the customer to filter the table by necessary parameters.
Filtration of complex tables with merged cells
Design of tables may vary, but this is not a problem for Table Filter add-on. It allows the customer to easily filter tables with merged cells, removed individual cells or tables of custom design.
The customer very often deals with filtration of several tables at a time. Such tables may also have different head labels, but it is not a problem for Table Filter. The add-on helps the customer to get the required table data filtered without any unexpected results caused by non-standard table design.
Conclusions
Table Filter add-on is used for about 15 different page templates for projects and for generation of information reports. Our Table Filter add-on allows the customer to manage table data and filter it in a blink of an eye.
This stimulates the efficiency of individual employees and simplifies data accessibility on large data arrays. Support for third-party add-ons and macros provides flexibility in managing content in Confluence and generating table data from the database tables or generating reports on Confluence content.