Quick actions

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Managing content lifecycle with quick actions

The app offers several features that help you manage the lifecycle of contents on your site.

Status details

The Status details quick action lets you look at the conditions the content was checked against in the content status scheme used in the space. You can also see all properties stored by the app for the content, as well as raw information to diagnose any problems. If the status is inherited from an ancestor, you can navigate to that content using the Open ancestor quick action.

Learn more about the Status details quick action.

Set owners

The app offers the ability to assign owners to contents on your Confluence site. Using the app's features, you can manage content ownership in ways that are significantly more flexible than the limited ownership features offered by Confluence Cloud. There are two differences that allow this. First, the ability to assign multiple owners to the same piece of content. Second, the ability to do this in a hierarchical way (by assigning owners to content trees under a particular piece of content).

Learn more about the Set owners quick action.

Expiration date

The app allows you to assign an expiration date directly to any piece of content. A content can also inherit zero or more expiration dates from its ancestor pages. The effective expiration date is the earliest date among the directly assigned and inherited expiration dates. If the effective expiration date is inherited from an ancestor rather than set directly on the content, you can navigate to that ancestor using the Open ancestor quick action.

You can then configure your schemes to assign statuses, send notifications, or perform automations based on that value. The Upcoming dashboard shows you the number of contents that expired or will expire in the recent and upcoming days. Note that the Upcoming dashboard only shows the expiration date directly assigned to a content, which may differ from the effective date.

Learn more about the Set and remove expiration date quick actions.

Archiving date

Similar to expiration dates, you can assign archiving dates to content. Everything described above in the expiration date section about direct, inherited, and effective dates also applies to archiving dates. The Upcoming dashboard shows you the number of contents that passed their archiving date recently or will pass it soon.

Learn more about the Set and remove archiving date quick actions.

Content analytics (views, updates)

The app lets you see who viewed or updated a content, and when. Using these quick actions, you can open a list of these events. The Views and Updates tabs show the list of activities on that content, while the Insights section offers aggregated statistics (count of events and users over a specified period of time).

Learn more about the View content analytics quick action.

Update and Confirm

If a piece of your content is marked as outdated because it has not been updated recently, you may want to review it to see if it is still up to date. If it is, you just want to let the app know. If it is not, you may decide to update the content now. Either way, the app offers a quick action to help you.

The Update quick action conveniently opens the content editor for you. When you are done editing, the app stores a fresh update event.

The Confirm quick action lets you quickly mark the content as up-to-date without making any actual changes to it, so the app considers it updated.

Learn more about the Update and Confirm quick actions.

Exclude and Include

In case you want to exclude a content from lifecycle management in an otherwise included space, you can use the Exclude quick action to mark the content as such.

If you change your mind, just use the Include quick action to re-include the content.

Learn more about the Exclude and Include quick actions.

Using the quick actions

There are several ways to take manual actions which affect the lifecycle of a page. Some of these manual actions are trivial and natural (e.g. editing), while others may require attention (e.g. modifying labels) or cannot be done via the built-in functions (e.g. modifying content properties).

To ease working with the lifecycle of a page, the app offers so-called quick actions. Using these you can work in a friendly, controlled and less error-prone way.

This video gives a 3-minute introduction to quick actions:

Using quick actions while viewing pages

Quick action buttons appear when hovering over the values corresponding to them in the Content Status Indicator.

After clicking one of the quick actions, you can configure its parameters and submit it with ease:

Note that different quick actions have different parameters:

Depending on its current status and on the quick action, the page's status may change immediately after submitting the quick action.

There are situations, however, when the status change is not immediate. For example, if you set a future date for expiration, then the page may remain "up-to-date" after submitting the quick action.

Finally, there are situations when there is no actual effect of the quick action. For example, if you set an archiving date for a page, but the assigned content status scheme does not use the arch.archivingDate field in any of its CQLs, then nothing is going to happen.

Using quick actions from the content list

Quick action buttons also appear when hovering over the values corresponding to them in content lists across the app (on different dashboards and in the macros).

After clicking any of the quick action buttons, you can use them in the same way as described above. To learn more about the differences and what to look out for, see this section.

Quick action triggered status changes

When you execute a quick action, the status of the page will be immediately recalculated. It results in an intuitive status change in most cases. For example, if you have a page that expired due to not being updated for 100 days and you use the "confirm" action, it becomes "up-to-date".

To understand how a change made through a quick action flows through the system and ultimately results in a content status change, see this section of the content status schemes documentation.

Typical pitfalls

In some cases, however, the calculated content status may not appear intuitive at first glance. Typical problems include:

Problem type	Example
Inheritance from an ancestor page: A page higher in the content hierarchy has a property that overrides the status for some or all of its descendant pages.	If you have a page in status "Excluded" and you "include" it, it remains "Excluded". Why? Because it has an ancestor that is excluded along with its descendants.
Missing statuses in the scheme: A required status has not been implemented in your scheme.	If you "exclude" a page, it remains included. Why? Because the assigned content status scheme is not configured to use the "Excluded" status or does not filter for the arch.exclusion content property.
Status precedence within the scheme: The statuses in the scheme are evaluated in order. A more general CQL condition placed earlier in the scheme may override a more specific condition that appears later.	If you "exclude" a page, it remains included, even though you configured the status properly. Why? Some other status in the scheme is positioned higher, so it always matches earlier than the "Excluded" status.
Misleading status names: Multiple status names have similar meanings and can be confused.	If you have a page that expired due to not being updated for 100 days and also due to having "2018 Jan 1" set as expiration date, and you use the "confirm" action, it remains "expired". Why? Because although the first condition is not satisfied anymore, the second still keeps the page in "expired".

These and similar situations are being caused by "overlapping" lifecycle rules and are relatively infrequent. Note that the app works correctly also in these cases, and even if the status is unchanged, its explanation in the Content Status Indicator will be different.

Tip: when you see the page in an unexpected status after taking a quick action, have a second look at the Status tab and perhaps review your content status scheme.

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