Globally modify external gadget URL references in Confluence?

[Alan Basque]

We (somewhat) recently changed our Jira (4.4.3) and Confluence (4.0) installs to implement SSL. It seems to be working fairly well overall except for one frustrating problem: whenever we interact with a Jira gadget in Confluence (editing the gadget, clicking on links within the displayed gadget, etc), the browser loses the Jira session and the user needs to sign into Jira again on any open Jira tab in that browser. After some investigation, I believe the problem is that the External Gadget URLs added in Confluence all still link to Jira using http rather than https. Unfortuantely, despite knowing the problem I can't figure out how to fix it.

I can go through the External Gadgets admin page in Confluence and delete all of the old http URLs and add the new http ones, but doing that will introduce a new problem. Any page that used one of the gadgets with the old URL will show a broken gadget link error. And since we were using Confluence for several years before using SSL, the list of pages with Jira gadgets is now pretty long.

I could theoretically just add the full set of valid https URLs and leave the existing http ones in there so older pages are not affected, but that would cause the Gadget Browser to list all external gadgets twice (one for http and once for https). So users could end up the old gadgets when creating a new page, and all of the old pages would still have the same lost Jira session problem.

I would even be open to manually modifying all of the broken gadgets on all of the affected pages, but I haven't found a way to get a list of either all broken gadget links OR all references to a particular external gadget URL (so I can update it before I change the configured URL).

And even if I *did* have a list of all affected pages/gadgets, because of the switch in Confluence 4.0 away from wiki markup I can't just simply modify the referenced URL to change http to https... if the gadget URL is invalid, the page just shows an error and forces me to recreate the gadget from scratch.

Does anyone have a suggestion that could help me update all references to external gadgets in our deployment to use the correct URLs?

Thanks!

[Svante Gustafsson Björkegren · Accepted solution]

Hi Alan,

This question is a bit old but I give you this answer anyway since I ran into the same problem today.

I found the solution to update the database directly.

See https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CONFKB/Changing+URLs+of+external+gadgets for details.

Rgrds,

// Svante

[Alan Basque]

Thanks for pointing this out, Svante. At the time, Atlassian support recommended that I query the database to find pages with invalid gadgets and then edit each page manually, which is what I ended up doing. Hopefully this Answer and the KB page you linked to will help make this process easier for anyone else that runs into this problem.