The future macro improves page display performance by rendering the body contents in the background while allowing the rest of the page to be displayed. It should be used around sections of a page that take a long time to display because they access external data, run reports or scripts, or gather and summarize metadata. A manual mode is also available that defers the rendering of the section until specifically requested by the user. The future macro shipped in the Cache for Confluence is compatible with the original macro and will be migrated to a native Confluence macro.

The future macro can be a handy way to avoid Confluence's default rendering timeout (normally 120 seconds) for request that are known to be long running any may sometimes exceed the limit. In these cases, it is best to also use with the Cache Macro to minimize the need for the extra processing.

May not work with some specific macros

History

Originally an Atlassian ShipIt project, it was not maintained and eventually fell behind the times with Confluence 4. It has been spiffed up, fixed up, enhanced, and included with Cache for Confluence starting with release 6.0.

Here is a quote from Chrisopher Owen, the original author:

For Atlassian’s 7th ShipIt Day I implemented a Confluence macro that would defer rendering its body until the full page was received by the client. The body of the macro would then be sent back to Confluence for rendering via AJAX while the user was presented with a loading placeholder. As the rendering of the body occurs in the future with respect to the original page rendering pipeline, I called this functionality the Future Macro. It is ideally suited for rendering content that is retrieved from external sources where high latency can hold up the delivery of other content on the page.

Parameters

Parameter	Default	Macro Browser	Description
title	Load or Loading	Title	Text displayed before rendering completes. Also will appear on the manual button. Helps user understand what information is going to appear. Prior to release 6.7, the default text would appear followed by the user provided title. After release 6.7, by default, only the user provided title will appear if it is not blank. There is an administrator option to control the behavior. See the incompatibility notice.
manual	false	Manual	When specified, the section will only be rendered after the user presses the load button. The rendering proceeds in the background until available.
timeout	120 seconds	Maximum number of seconds to render section	Timeout in seconds before the section rendering is abandoned. Once abandoned, a timeout error message will be displayed.
delay	0	Delay in seconds	Rendering will be delayed by the number of seconds requested. The client browser will delay sending the request to the server to render the body. This applies only to manual=false cases. This can be used in cases where there are multiple future macros on the same page and it is more important to render some of these more quickly than others so the results for those will appear quicker. Since 6.7.
retryInterval	Default	Retry interval in seconds	When greater than 0 and the rendering of the body indicates an error that can be retried, the client will wait and then retry the request. See Retry Feature. Default uses the default setting configured in administration. Since 6.8.

Default loading message

Manual load

Macro browser preview loading

Note that in macro browser preview, only the loading message will show. The body will not be rendered in the preview window.

Examples

Video

Future Macro - Example Video

SQL Example

{future}
{sql:dataSource=exampleDS}
select * from products
{sql}
{future}

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