Welcome PocketQuery for Confluence 4.0.0

Ghost -

We are happy to announce PocketQuery for Confluence 4.0! A lot has changed since our very first Marketplace app was published in March 2013 and we are stoked about ~1300 Confluence installations using our data integration tool! The improvements with this new major release are primarily targeting the set of users that use our tool on a very regular basis: PocketQuery editors and administrators. Despite this primary focus on administration, regular PocketQuery macro users will see major improvements of our app just alike. Let’s dive into the changes…

Renaming of queries (and other entities) and names with spaces

Let us introduce this one as the first new “feature” because many PocketQuery administrators have waited for this for a long time: you can now rename your queries, datasources, templates, and converters and put spaces in their names. We’re going to leave “feature” in quotes here because we are aware that it was really about time for this change.

The new PocketQuery preview - in the new macro browser

We thought that the existing PocketQuery preview looked a bit ooold. That’s why we gave it a proper revamp! If you now add a PocketQuery macro to a page, the preview will appear like this:

All the settings you already know are still there. But the UX is very different. Let’s select a query and click the “Preview” button:

Looks similar to the default Confluence macro browser? Maybe on the screenshots. You’ll have to experience it in real life and you’ll see the difference immediately! Big promise!

The new PocketQuery preview - in the administration

Correct! This preview now also exists in the PocketQuery administration – a feature that administrators have requested pretty much since we released the first version of our app! When you now navigate to the PQ administration, you’ll see a big “Preview” button:

You might have guessed what’s happening when I click this button… that’s right: that same preview will appear:

With this preview dialog, you can now run and parameterize any query from within the PocketQuery administration! And the preview dialog will also remember your previous settings because we expect that administrators will test the same query multiple times in a row (you can clear the settings with the “clear” link at the bottom of the preview).

This above preview was opened with a click on the prominent “Query Preview” button. As a shortcut, any query in the administration now also has a “Test Query” button:

Clicking this button will open the same preview filled with the query shown in the form:

There are a few more features associated with the new Preview functionality that are out-of-scope of a release blog post, so if you are curious, please check our documentation and feel free to create a ticket in our ServiceDesk!

We have heard from a few PQ editors that the link to the administration in the user menu is mis-located. And after some thinking we agreed and moved it to the administration menu (the “cog wheel”). This also means that the admin menu will now be seen for users who are PQ editors but no Confluence administrators. In the latter case, this menu will only show the link to the PQ administration.

Audit log entries

The audit log in Confluence is a transparent way for administrators to see what’s going on in their instance. We now create audit log entries for interactions with the PocketQuery administration.

Modernizing the code base

What we described in the above sections of this blog post was probably less than half the work for this release. We spent a significant time modernizing the frontend architecture (for the devs out there: it is now a standalone Webpack application) and many other quality improvements on the code base. You won’t really see those but we promise that you will “feel” them over time!

Is our data safe?

Yes! There are no upgrade routines and your data will remain as it is! However, to be super-safe, we recommend to export your PocketQuery entities before you update! If you have any questions, please reach out to us!

What’s Next?

Wow, you made it to the end! Thanks for reading this release post of PocketQuery for Confluence 4.0. You can now find our new release on the Atlassian Marketplace (or just update PocketQuery on your Confluence instance). Here are some useful links:

…and a final side note: we are currently developing a Cloud version of PocketQuery! Stay tuned if you have ambitions to move to the Atlassian Cloud and you want to take PocketQuery with you!