Kenneth McClean

As is often the case, the point of this blog isn’t so much to explain how to do something complicated. The point is that I’m trying to explain something simple that should be easy to find an answer for, but was not. In this case my question was “what on earth is a UserTemplate (User Template) in Confluence”?

On the surface, it seems like creating a new user in Confluence should be a pretty straightforward process.   There’s a UserAccessor class, and that class has a createUser() method.   However, the expected inputs to that method are a User Template object and a Credentials object. From the class documentation:

• createUser

   ConfluenceUser createUser(com.atlassian.user.User userTemplate,
                            com.atlassian.user.security.password.Credential password)

The import required to work with Credential is spelled out for us, but the userTemplate is a different story.   There’s virtually no documentation on what that means, and no amount of Googling “Confluence User Template”, “UserTemplate”, “Confluence Create User Template” will actually tell you what to do. Part of the issue is that “template” means several different things in the context of Confluence, so that muddies the waters.

Let’s cut to the chase. Here’s the code that I eventually came up with:

 import com.atlassian.confluence.api.model.people.User
import com.atlassian.sal.api.component.ComponentLocator
import 

I admit, this one is a very specific use case.  But I had a reason to create the script, so maybe someone will find it useful.  I also got to use the .collect method in a useful way!

This script identifies all of the pages that are linked from a target page.  It then compares that list of links to a list of all the pages in the Space.

By doing this, it identifies any pages in the Space that aren’t linked on the target page.  This could be useful if you had a wiki or something, and wanted to know which pages weren’t linked on the front page.

One interesting thing I discovered while doing this is the outgoingLinks method of the page class.   Instead of having to use regex to find the URLs on a page, I simply had to call this method and all of the urls were returned for me.

 import com.atlassian.confluence.pages.PageManager
import com.atlassian.confluence.spaces.SpaceManager
import com.atlassian.sal.api.component.ComponentLocator

def pageManager = ComponentLocator.getComponent(PageManager)
def spaceManager = ComponentLocator.getComponent(SpaceManager)

def targetSpace = spaceManager.getSpace("<Space Key>")
def spacePages = pageManager.getPages(targetSpace, true)
def targetPage = pageManager.getPage(<page ID as Long>)

def outgoingLinks = targetPage.outgoingLinks.collect { link -> 

link.toString().minus("ds:")
}

spacePages.each {
  page ->