Month: August 2021

Overview

There may come a day where you need to script the migration of permissions from one Confluence Space to another.

The permissions of a Confluence Space can be retrieved and treated as collection of objects.  This allows us to easily pass them on to a source page as a new set of permissions.

The Code

We’re using the Soap Service to affect change in the permissions of a Space.  After using the ComponentLocator to declare the SpaceSoapService, we retrieve the source Space as an object.  We do the same for the destination source.

The permissions of the source Space are then extracted.  This is not a single object, but rather a collection of objects.

We iterate through each of the permission objects.  Each object is a collection of attributes.  We need to determine if the permissions object relates to a single user, or a group.  Every type of permission gets it’s own object.

Permissions objects associated with a group look like so:

 [CREATEATTACHMENT,89948111,confluence-space-admins,null,null]

The first attribute is the permission type.  The second is the permission ID. The third element is the group with which this permission is associated, and this is where the format of the permissions object differs

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Overview

All Confluence Spaces have a sidebar, in which you’ll find the page hierarchy as well as any useful links that the Space Administrator has seen fit to add. 

Unfortunately Atlassian provide no clearly documented way of programmatically adding links to the sidebar of a Space.   That doesn’t mean it’s not possible, but rather that Atlassian haven’t seen fit to document how it may be accomplished.

Approach

The question now facing us is “how are links added to a sidebar when using the Confluence web interface?” If we can answer that question, we can programmatically replicate it.

This question is answered over the course of three steps:

1. We first add a shortcut to the sidebar of a Space, using the main Confluence interface.  When we do this, we can watch the network traffic that is generated by this request, and tease it apart to determine the actions we must take to replicate it.

2. By inspecting the Network Traffic, we can extract the CURL request that was sent to the Confluence server. From the CURL request, we can extract the target link:

 https://<confluenceURL>/rest/ia/1.0/link

This is the link that the Confluence web interface uses to communicate the desired change

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