Filtering in Rovo agents

[Serhii Horobets]

Hello!

I need to restrict my Rovo agent to deal with only a subset of pages in my Confluence Cloud site—specifically, pages that have specific labels or labels with a certain prefix.

I haven't been able to achieve the desired results by playing with the agent's instructions. The agent always simulated filtering but didn't do so as I expected (I expected direct calls to the Confluence API). So, it showed me pages that didn't fulfill the criteria.

So, as a first step to solve my task, I'd like to just filter pages that are returned in the agent's response by simple criteria (preferably using CQL), such as "label='information-system'".

I know that Rovo agents use plugins to fetch data. According to the article "https://support.atlassian.com/rovo/docs/knowledge-sources-for-agents", the "Page search" and "Search QA" plugins are used for searching in Confluence sites.

This article "https://www.atlassian.com/blog/atlassian-engineering/hybrid-llm" reveals that the "Page search" plugin can query using CQL (in the article, it's called "Page-Search-Plugin").

So, is it possible to instruct a Rovo agent to filter Confluence pages by some CQL criteria using the "Page search" plugin? Or maybe there are other ideas on how to reliably filter Confluence pages while communicating with Rovo agents?

[Tomislav Tobijas · Accepted solution]

Interesting question @Serhii Horobets 👀

I haven't used Rovo 'that deep' so can't say for sure but it might be possible. I'll just move this to Rovo product/app group for the product team and experts from that area can chime in.

Cheers,
Tobi

[Serhii Horobets]

@Tomislav Tobijas , thank you! Will wait for any advice

[Dr Valeri Colon _Connect Centric_]

Thanks for jumping in on this @Tomislav Tobijas glad to have you here. @Serhii Horobets Rovo agents don’t currently support direct CQL filtering via the "Page search" plugin in custom instructions. While the plugin uses CQL internally, agent prompts can’t enforce CQL queries. For now, you can guide agents using clear instruction patterns (e.g., “Only use pages labeled ‘X’”), but filtering may not be strict. Fine-grained filtering is a requested feature and not fully supported yet, but consider giving it an upvote.

[Serhii Horobets]

>> For now, you can guide agents using clear instruction patterns (e.g., “Only use pages labeled ‘X’”),

As I can assume, agents have access to both pages content and metadata, but don't distinguish them. What is the best way to tell the agent, that when I say "label" or "labeleing", it should be looking for labels in the page's metadata? Maybe there are specific words or phrases? Everything I came up with didn't work in an acceptable way.

[Serhii Horobets]

@Dr Valeri Colon _Connect Centric_ regarding "Fine-grained filtering is a requested feature" - this feature request is related to custom fields in the different Atlassian product - Jira. My need, from my side, seems as completely different.

May I suppose that there is no any feature request relevant to my needs?

[Dr Valeri Colon _Connect Centric_]

Yes, the ticket that comes up when I link to the request board is unrelated to yours and relates to what was on the board when I copied the link. Feel free to add a request specific to your needs. 

[Dr Valeri Colon _Connect Centric_]

Great question, @Serhii Horobets. Currently, Rovo agents don’t reliably distinguish between content and metadata like labels. There's no official prompt phrasing that guarantees metadata filtering. You can try: “Only include pages with the label ‘X’ in metadata,” but behavior may still vary.

[Serhii Horobets]

@Dr Valeri Colon _Connect Centric_ , thank you for your great feedback! As I understood, for now the only tool I have is prompt engineering. Really, in this case it would be very helpfull to know structure and format, that is used for returning data to the agent from corresponding plugins. Only in this case it's possible to construct effective prompt to the AI. Simple "always look for labels in page's metadata, not in the content" doesn’t work well.

I think, my next step is to get answers from the official support. Maybe, a similar feature request exists but I cannot find it? Or, maybe, it can suggest me something

[Dr Valeri Colon _Connect Centric_]

Sure @Serhii Horobetsfeel free to reach out to the Atlassian team anytime at https://support.atlassian.com/  There's also the developer Discussion | Q&A Forum here are some prompting tips by @Ian Buchanan [ianbuchanan]