How to Search for MultiExcerpt Includes - Find Includes Feature and Troubleshooting

Owned by Stacy Coakley
Last updated: Feb 14, 2022 by Leslie GilbertVersion comment
5 min read

How to use "Find Includes"

You can search for all the locations where a specific MultiExcerpt has been included by using the Find Includes feature

  1. Navigate to the page where the MultiExcerpt is located
  2. Click (page edit mode) to view the MultiExcerpt macro
  3. Click on the MultiExcerpt macro and a few options will display
  4. Click on                                                                                                                                        
    1. 'Find Includes-this space'                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       
    2. 'Find Includes-selected space'                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        
    3. 'Find Includes-all space' 
      1. This can be disabled by the Admin. You will receive this message if it is disabled. See Troubleshooting below for more details                                                                                                                                               

      2. We are working on CMEP-329 - Getting issue details... STATUS . Please vote, comment, or watch this issue if you are experiencing this. How to Vote on Jira Issues 
  5. The list of pages that have that MultiExcerpt on it are displayed. Clicking on the link will take you to that page.


Troubleshooting

If "Find Includes" is very CPU-intensive or slow on your server then your site is probably large enough that the DB query that it is using is reaching its limits.

  • The admin can disable the "Find Include" button for their site
  • If a user attempts the use the "find includes" feature and it has been disabled they will see this message


If "Find Includes" returns no pages and you know that the MultiExcerpt is included on at least one page:

  • CASE SENSITIVITY:
    • "Find includes" is case-sensitive but MultiExcerpt Include is not: CMEP-87
      • If your MultiExcerpt Include uses an excerpt by including it using a name that has different case than the excerpt it will include the excerpt (eg. 'MyExcerpt' vs 'myexcerpt')
      • The "Find Includes" button will NOT find any MultiExcerpt Includes that include an excerpt using the "wrong" case. 
        • eg. for an excerpt named "MyExcerpt" none of the includes that include it by using the name "myexcerpt" will be found
      • Users who override the auto-completion in the drop-down for setting the excerpt name in an include macro are subject to this problem.

If "Find Includes" is slow or returns HTTP 504 gateway timeout errors:

  • TIMEOUTS:
    • Atlassian has been constantly improving Confluence for the scalability of large sites.  The "Find Includes" feature relies on Confluence to efficiently query large sites.  If you have a large site you should consider staying up to date with the latest Confluence Server upgrades.

    • Confluence confluence indexes are not always correct because of bugs in Confluence and you should consider rebuilding the indexes after a Confluence Server upgrade or when you are experiencing performance problems with your site.  See Atlassian's guide for rebuilding Confluence content indexes: Content Index Administration

    • Atlassian recommends keeping large sites clean to help with the performance and scalability of content queries.  See Clean up your Confluence site in the Confluence 7.10 release notes.
    • It is possible that your connection to the page was closed before you get the results of the query of multiexcerpt-includes
      • This can be caused by low timeouts on your Confluence or web servers, or configurations of your browser environment

      • Look for errors in your Confluence server log (Working with Confluence Logs) that look like this:

        An established connection was aborted by the software in your host machine
      • Try increasing timeouts on your servers and/or try another PC/browser to see if that affects the issue.
      • Another tool for diagnosing timeouts is Http Archive Format files that can be obtained from your browser
    • If all else fails, then your site may just be too big for your database to rapidly query the content tables to find pages that have Multiexcerpt macros that point to your Multiexcerpt Include.  In that case, you may not be able to use the "Find Includes" feature and should disable it from the admin tool if it is causing trouble for your users or your servers