How can I create dynamic hierarchical pages

[Erez Yalon]

Hi,

I am writing description pages for different items.

Many of the items share a lot of features, so they can be sorted into groups, where each group has a general description and then each item has its own specific feature.

I would like each description to contain the descriptions of its parents + its specific addition.

For example, I have the items: Kitty, Spot, Barky, and Polly.

They are sorted into the following:

• Animals
  • Mammals
    • Cats
      • Kitty
    • Dogs
      • Spot
      • Barky
  • Birds
    • Parrots
      • Polly

The "Animals" page will have the following description: Is an animal

So both "Mammals" and "Birds" will have this beginning with an addition of: Is a mammal Or Is a bird accordingly.

and so on...

Eventually, the "Spot" page will show the following description:
Is an animal.
Is a mammal.
Is a dog.
His name is Spot.

The big advantage I'm trying to achieve here is to be able to change/fix/update a description and having it updated in all children pages.

Any idea if it can be done in Confluence?

Thanks

[Robert Reiner _smartics_]

On Confluence Server the projectdoc Toolbox (commercial add-on I am one of the authors) provides such a feature. It allows to define properties and reference (and reuse) property values from other pages.

• Display Document Property Macro
• Display Document Properties Macro
• Display Document Property Ref Macro
• Display Document Property Ref Concat Macro

I'm not sure if this could also be done to some extend with the Page Properties Macro and Page Properties Report Macro for your use case. But due to the granularity of your requirement this could be the closest you would get with tools provided by Confluence.

[Erez Yalon]

Looks good, but we are using Confluence Cloud, so this, unfortunately, seems irrelevant.

[Ignacio Pulgar]

You may do so by using the following macros:

• Excerpt Macro
• Excerpt Include Macro

Hope it helps.

[Ignacio Pulgar]

Another macro that may be useful for these purposes is the Include Page Macro.

[Erez Yalon]

Thanks @Ignacio Pulgar, but the Excerpt Macros has two problems regarding my use case:

1. I cannot Include an Excerpt from @parent, only from specific pages - this needs to be dynamic.
2. I need to Include several Excerpts from a page. If a page has several Excerpts Macros, only the first one will be included.

Any other solution?

[Ignacio Pulgar]

That's right. Have you tried the Include Page Macro?

[Erez Yalon]

Page Macros are not relevant.