Multiple Excerpts on a page to use in a Confluence Database

[Anthea Wilkinson]

This relates to this question:

Excerpt-in-Confluence-Database/qaq-p/2896718

@Cyrille Martin

Can anyone elaborate on why it is considered good practice to use only one excerpt macro on a page? I am considering using one of the plugins to allow me to access multiple parts of a page in a database (if that works - and I don't know if it does!), but I would love to understand if/why it might be a bad idea. 

My use case is as follows:

I have a list of information, with various columns.

Some of my columns are nice formatted text fields, some are tags and numbers etc. So ideally I would create a page template, laid out the way I want it, to show each record on a single page each.

I could put it all directly in a database, but since I want to be able to report on each record within that database in a nicely formatted way, the database doesn't to help me with that. 

But I also want to be able to see the info in table format too. So I though I could create a database, and pull in each of the data points as excerpts on each page. But that does not work because I do not have the ability to pull in multiple excerpts to my database.

Is there any other way to get what I need? Or can I use a plugin to allow me to use multiple excerpts per page to populate my database?

Thanks

[Cyrille Martin]

Hi @Anthea Wilkinson 

The excerpt of a page is an abstract of it if you want.

The specific content, defined as an excerpt, may be used in several macros, like content by labels, recently updated content, children page...
On those macros you can display a list of pages with the possibility to display the excerpt of each page.

That's why I said that the good practice natively in Confluence is to only have 1 excerpt macro in a page.

But additional apps, like multi-excerpt macro car allow you to create several excerpt frames in the page, and those excerpt frames won't interfere with the native excerpt macro.

Multi-excerpt apps manage the content as a metadata, [ name + value ].

For your use case, using Page Properties and Page Properties report could an option :
here a good article on the way to use it : https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Confluence-articles/How-to-use-Page-Properties-Macros-in-Confluence-Best-practices/ba-p/2370523 

Regards

[Anthea Wilkinson]

Thanks. Isn't that just hard-coding the use case for excerpts though? 

I took a look at the page properties, and I can see that might help me if I did not need to join "tables" together. And if I use page properties, I lose the database-like functionality. I was hoping to use the database features to join multiple tables of info together. 

If the page properties could be pulled into a database column, in the same way as excerpts, that could solve my problem, but it looks like that isn't possible.

I think I need to look into the multi-excerpt macro add-ons, I just don't know if they will allow me to pull those multiple excerpts into individual database columns.

[Cyrille Martin]

I tried to use multi-excerpt in the Database but it is not available, as it is not native in Confluence.

For page properties report, the gathering of the pages is done on labels, so depending on your use case, it might work.

For example, if you have 5 pages with the labels "one", "generic" and 7 pages with the labels "two", "generic" and 3 pages with "two", "global"

You can create a page properties report but based on the label filter you will put in the macro you will not have the same list of content.

Here is what you can do with the page properties report macro : 

first report with pages with label "generic" -> 12 pages

second report with pages with label "global" -> 3 pages

third report with pages with label "generic" and "two" -> 7 pages

forth report with pages with label "global" or "generic" -> 15 pages

[Anthea Wilkinson]

thankyou very much, I will try this out.