Tag: API

Introduction

I’ve started working on a QR-code based inventory management and pricing system.   One of the foundational elements of this system is the ability to print a price tag with a QR code on it, and to be able to update the link associated with that QR code without replacing the sticker.

This is possible if the QR code links to bit.ly instead of directly to the link in question.   So long as the shortened URL is generated under a Bitly account, it can be edited and modified after the fact.

The Bitly API is at the same time well documented, and a bit frustrating.  It’s frustrating because all of the example Python code on the internet uses the bitly_api package, which is apparently either abandoned or complete trash.   For example, all of the examples on the internet result in an error like this:

  bitly api.bitly _api.Bitly Error: "PERMANENTLY REMOVED"

 I assume this means that the method has been removed from the class or package, but I couldn’t find a way to fix it.

Instead, let’s use the https requests library to connect to the Bitly API and generate a shortened link.

Setup

First things first, you should go check

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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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