Searches and links

[Karl Whitburn]

Dear all,

I have a specific business case i am working on and wanted to get thoughts or assistance:

• My company now has over 1000 reports we service and a lot of documentation in Confluence to support the reports
• However, finding what is relevant is problematic and the 5000 users we support struggle here
• Resolution:
  • Create a Conf Space called 'Knowledge Base'
  • Move everything relevant, in there, one location
  • All pages short and to the point where possible
  • Supporting FAQ's and how too's.
• Problem:
  • A report could have a page with 10 topics on it:
    • Background
    • Examples
    • Attributes
    • Metrics
    • Business cases
    • Tables and fields impacted
  • The pages become large
• Idea:
  • We have a search that sits at the top of the knowledge base
  • We also use JIRA and a front end JIRA app for collecting JIRA tickets but also for rendering theses 'User Guides' when a user searches for a topic e.g. 'How do i create a filter'?
  • If the guide doesn't help, they create a JIRA ticket
  • I am looking at the Anchor Macro but i cant get it to work the way i want it to
• Question: 
  • How can i use a search box to search on a term e.g. 'How can i create a filter' and if they do select one of the search results, it goes direct to the anchor embedded half way down a page?

My understanding is that macros have not been attempted inside a search box itself, they work on static links e.g. contents index.

Thanks for your help in advance.

Karl

[Stephen Sifers]

Hello Karl,

Looks like you’re dealing with a lot of reporting and documentation management. The problems you are having do seem to be good growing problems, and good work at address the problems before they become major.

There are advanced search options within Confluence to allow for more exact search results. For more information on advanced searching, please see Confluence Search Syntax.

As far as being able to click on a search results and have it take you to an anchor within the found page, this is not currently supported. There is a feature request already present to allow for searching with an anchor name. The feature request is here CONFSERVER-43672.

Something else to consider to assist with extending your documentation is the usage of Confluence Labels along with Page Properties. This will allow you to have more labels and exact syntax on your pages which will make search results more accurate when keywords are searched.

I hope you find this useful.

Regards,
Stephen Sifers