Hi all,
One of our blockers to converting from Connect to Forge is that our app bylines open large modal dialogs on user click. That is not supported yet by Atlassian Forge. Byline modules can only display small inline popups.
Please vote for [ECO-880] Open a modal dialog directly from a byline module in Confluence if this would also be useful for your team.
Regards,
Chris
Digital Rose
Thanks for raising this. While the ability to launch modals directly from the byline module is not supported today, it is possible to launch a modal of varying sizes in both UI Kit and Custom UI from the inline popup in the byline.
Thanks @SeanBourke for the suggestion. We did try this two step approach as a prototype, and it sort of worked.
The byline is the primary entry point for our app (now that the action toolbar is gone). The UX of click byline → wait for render → click #2 → wait for render of actual app does not feel like the forge upgrade we are hoping for our customers.
Also, one weirdness with this workaround is we were unable to programmatically close the byline inline popup once the large modal was opened. (view.close() returned an error). This means when the user finished with the app, the small inline popup was still there behind it and needed another click on the page to dismiss it as well. We weren’t sure if that was intentional or a bug?
I learned recently why Forge renders extremely slowly: they’re using AWS Lambda for each invocation.
Lambda has a cold start problem. You can visibly see the issue whereby the loading spinner time is much slower on the first render than the second.
Additionally AWS plans to start charging fees for that cold start from August 1st, 2025 which will increase Atlassian’s Forge delivery costs which I assume will get passed onto developers: AWS Lambda standardizes billing for INIT Phase | AWS Compute Blog
Should have gone with Cloudflare Workers.