MultiExcerpt Include Cache

Loading the page for the first time after enabling caching may still be slow while everything is cached in memory. Page performance will increase once everything has been cached. You may experience slowness for subsequent visits to the page if you leave it before this caching is complete. So if you have hundreds of MultiExcerpt Includes, we suggest you pull up the page and let it do its thing while you do something else. Or stare at it.  Whatever method works for you to give it some time.

Other Admin Settings

"Case Sensitive MultiExcerptNames" is used to enforce case-sensitivity for excerpt names, as specified by a MultiExcerpt Include. The default is true because the proper functioning of the cache and the "Find Includes" button depends on case-sensitive MultiExcerpt names. You can opt out of this if you have many mismatched references to excerpts and need time to fix them all. In old releases of MultiExcerpt, the names were case-insensitive, and this may have allowed some users to mismatch their names/keys for excerpts.

"Find Includes" is a feature that page authors can use to find a list of the location of the MultiExcerpt Includes that include their MultiExcerpt. It can be a DB and CPU-intensive operation, so some admins prefer to disable this feature.

"Regular Expression to Match For MultiExcerpt-Include" is a beta feature of MultiExcerpt Include. It allows the inclusion of other macros that are not MultiExcerpt macros.

The regular expression matches the type/name of a macro. For example, the Code Block macro name/type is "code," so you could set the regular expression to "code" (without quotes) to include Code Block macros with MultiExcerpt Include. In the MultiExcerpt Include macro, instead of using a MultiExcerpt name, you would use a colon-delimited set of parameters that match the Code Block macro you want to include—for example, language=java:title=HelloWorldExample.

This could be used to include a Code Block macro from one page to another page.

Note that the "Find Includes" button does not work for includes that use this beta feature to include other macros. This beta feature is not wired to the "Find Includes" functionality.

The MultiExcerpt Include cache is not a “per-user” cache. The cache is “per-multiexcerpt-include-instance

An access check is performed on the cached value to ensure that a user has permission to see the included content before it is rendered. Still, this permission check is based only on Confluence permissions for the source of the original content (page permissions for the page with the MultiExcerpt on it).

Therefore, all users who have permission to see the excerpt content (based on Confluence permissions) will have access to the cached value. This works for most scenarios, but imagine a complex scenario in which you are nesting 3rd party macros in your MultiExcerpt that either restrict their content using something other than the Confluence restrictions for the page they are on or the 3rd party macros do something like render content that differs per-user. In such a scenario, you would want to disable the cache for your MultiExcerpt Include macro.

Another scenario where you may want to disable the cache for a MultiExcerpt Include is when you include complex content subject to intermittent responses from whatever service(s) are behind them. The included content is implemented with poor/unreliable error handling and is prone to occasionally render “bad” responses. Such “bad” responses are usually solved in web apps with a page refresh and may not be noticed often enough by your users for them to report it to you. However, if a bad response ends in the MultiExcerpt Include cache, it will become more noticeable.

The admin tool allows you to flush the cache anytime, but if you ever encounter intermittent problems with rendering any included content from 3rd party macros, consider disabling the MultiExcerpt cache. You can disable the caching either per MultiExcerpt Include or globally. We recommend you disable it at the MultiExcerpt level so that you have the flexibility you need, depending on your usage and your environment.