Report Snapshots in Confluence Cloud with PocketQuery

Georg Schmidl -

Our Atlassian Confluence app PocketQuery is great for creating reports. You can connect datasources via SQL and REST and display dynamic reports on Confluence pages. And the great thing about it is that your reports are always up to date because it loads fresh data every time you visit the page.

Old Data?

But wait. What if you want to look at old data? Let’s imagine we have a report “Users in Groups“ that shows us how many users are currently in some groups, let’s say sales, marketing, development and finance.

Now how do we know, how many users where in those groups one year ago? We don’t have a timestamp on group membership, so we cannot filter by entries from last year. Ans some users may not be in the system anymore.

Snapshots in PocketQuery

This is where snapshots in PocketQuery come in. You can create snapshots from the PocketQuery macro and look at it later with the exact data from that point in time. So if we create a snapshot from our membership chart now, we can look at it one year later and see how many users where in our groups one year before.

How does it work?

Simply edit your PocketQuery macro and hit the “Create snapshot“ button.

After saving the page it will show the report only with the data from that snapshot. Easy, isn’t it?

Managing Multiple Snapshots

But often you want to create multiple snapshots over time for the same report. There a two ways on how to do that:

  1. Multiple pages: Create a page for each snapshot and add a date to the title. For example, Group Report April 2021, Group Report May 2021, …
  2. Page versions: You can edit the macro on the page where you created the snapshot, discard it, and create another one. After saving the page, Confluence will create a new page version with the new snapshot. And your old snapshot is saved in the last version. Now use the Confluence page history function to click through the versions to look at your historical reports.

Summary

We hope this article showed you why you can benefit from using report snapshots and gave you an insight on how to use them in PocketQuery. If you haven’t used PocketQuery before, you can give it a try on the Marketplace or visit the documentation to get an overview of its capabilities. And if you got questions, don’t hesitate to shoot us an email at info@livelyapps.com.