Description

Over the last year, we have been working closely with Atlassian Confluence development team to enable Advance Tables for Confluence to use the Atlassian Connect framework. This framework is the fundamental building block for Cloud apps going into the future of the Atlassian Cloud infrastructure. This effort is nearing completion and has reached a stage where cloud user's of the Advance Tables for Confluence app will be gradually converted over to the new framework. This process has started and is expected to complete by the end of February, 2017.

Advantages

With this new approach for delivering the Advance Tables for Confluence app functionality, there are some key advantages.

• The ability for Advance Tables for Confluence improvements and fixes to be delivered more quickly to users. User instances automatically receive new and improved capability within minutes of them being formally released by the Advance Tables for Confluence development team. This compares to the previous approach where change could take weeks or months to flow through the Atlassian Cloud release procedure for non-connect apps.
• Minimizes cases or severity where Confluence Cloud updates may impact the proper behavior of Advance Tables for Confluence macros. While rare, we have experienced a few of these cases over the last few years that have caused customer pain. While this will provide long term benefits, there will be some near term disruptions.
• Allows Atlassian to deliver more significant infrastructure improvements for the benefit of all Cloud users.

What do administrators need to do?

Nothing for the conversion. The conversion will be done by Atlassian at the appropriate time for your instance as part of the rollout staging.

Once your instance is converted, we recommend administrators check any critical pages to ensure behavior is as expected. Please report any issues immediately after looking through the known problem list below.

Since this is a gradual rollout process, to know if your instance has been converted, go to Manage apps and expanding Appfire - Advanced Tables to view the version field. If the field looks something like 1.0.2-AC then you have been converted; else, it will show 7.1.2.

What do macro users need to do?

 Nothing. Macros do not need to be changed. They should continue to work similar to the previous support.

What will be different?

The key differences in behavior are:

• Macros will render in the background and then appear as the data becomes available.
• The performance of the macro rendering will be mostly dependent on the performance of the user's client machine as a majority of the processing is now done using the browser's JavaScript engine. The way the connect architecture works is that macros get loaded dynamically AFTER the page is rendered and displayed. This allows the page to be displayed to the user somewhat quicker, but then there is much more delay on each macro loading. The loading time is now more dependent on client JavaScript speed (some browsers may be better than others) and network connections. Like it or not, this is a permanent restriction of the architecture.
• There may be difference is behavior of some interactions with other page elements or macros. The Atlassian Confluence development team continues to improve the integration and interactions of macros in the connect environment. Both teams are monitoring user scenarios that may be negatively impacted by inter-operability problems in order to develop appropriate resolutions. The conversion rollout has been planned to delay rollout to some instances that have situations not covered adequately by the current implementation.
• There are some other known issues that will be resolved over time. See below for details.

Reporting problems

If you experience any problems or behavior changes that are unexpected, please do not hesitate to open a support issue (login required - see Help). This helps us identify and prioritize fixes and improvements.

Known issues

General issues

1. Inter-operability between macros. Specifically rendering issues and differences. There have always been some compatibility problems between macros. This is more of an issue with connect based apps. The Confluence connect development team is working on improvements in this area based on likely use cases. CONF-41551.
2. Anchor macros within Advance Tables for Confluence macros do not work. Atlassian has deemed this a permanent restriction. See CE-886 for details and feedback. Instances with this scenario will be converted in mid-Feb. 
3. Sorting inline tasks in connect macros does not work. See CONF-45450.
4. Page properties macro within Advanced Tables macros do not work. CONF-45487 has been resolved. Instances with this scenario are still pending conversion. 
5. Preview in macro editor does not work in many cases. Workaround is to use full page preview until the issue can be resolved. CE-685 and CE-13. Resolution is expected by mid-Feb.
6. Style (css) macro on the page no longer active in Advance Tables for Confluence macros. See CE-890.
   • For Table Plus, the workaround is to include the macro within the body of the Table Plus macro.
7. Export to PDF or Word does not include Advance Tables for Confluence macros. Workaround is to use browser's print to PDF function. CE-907,   TBL-722 - Getting issue details... STATUS .
8. Excerpt include macro results in 404 error when including a connect macro. Atlassian is investigating. CE-876.
9. JIRA Issue/Filter macro inside a Table Plus macro does not show the Jira issues.  It shows an empty list.  See TBL-764, TBL-860 and CE-919. Update 01 May 2017 The Jira Issue macro displays results but the formatting of the Table Plus macro is not being applied.  This is because the Jira contents are loaded asynchronously.
   Related is the Jira Issue macro when using the Total Issue Count option does not work when used inside Table Plus macro.  It just spins.  See  TBL-879 and CE-1047. 

Specific issues