Release notes 5.2

Highlights

This is a major update satisfying a long time requirement for data sources that can be dynamically added. Many other important improvements are also provided.

Dynamic data sources

Administrators can now configure a data source via app configuration. These are referred to as data source profiles. These can be used just like the normal application server defined data sources. A key benefit is that a server restart is not required to make the data source active for use by macros. From a macro use perspective, they can be referenced just like application server datasources.

For instance, an administrator can define a data source profile called companyDS and make it available for active use. Later, an application server defined companyDS data source can be defined. After a server restart, the administrator can remove the data source profile and macros will now start using the application server defined data source. A key benefit of this approach is to validate that specific connection configuration is working properly before converting it into an application server data source configuration.

Application server based data sources are still recommended for best performance and control, especially connection pooling.

Macro Security for Confluence for data source profiles is the same as application data sources.

See Data Source Profiles for more details.

Before and After SQL

Data source profiles can add before and after SQL that automatically gets inserted around the macro defined SQL. For example, this can be used to implement site wide security policies like role based security. The SQL must be constructed to work for the specific database and arbitrary SQL provided by individual macros. A new special variable @user_id@ will be replaced in SQL with the currently logged in user id or anonymous.

For example, this enables a role based security scheme to be implemented.

See Data Source Profiles for more details.

Data Source alias

Macros can reference a data source (dataSource parameter) that gets redirected to a specific application server data source defined by the administrator. The benefit of this is to make it easier to migrate to a differently named data source.

See Data Source Profiles for more details.

XHTML output

SQL that wants to generate XHTML output can use a new output parameter value of xhtml. The result will be rendered as XHTML before display. Similar to HTML output, you most likely will need to disable html encoding (authority required). See How to use html in queries.

CSS parameters

Additional parameters to control table class, table style, and row styles. Unique row styles can be set for the heading rows, and any number of data rows. Row styles for data rows repeat when the number of data rows exceeds the number of row styles. This allows various kinds of stripping.

Resolved issues