Hey everyone, Babita here from the Confluence Cloud Migrations team with an update on significant improvements our team has been making to PDF exports!
What is changing?
In the new backend flow, after Confluence receives an export request, it now forwards to a chain of new microservices which help compose the Confluence page into a PDF and uploads it to S3.
This exported page is then available to the user via S3 pre-signed url as a downloadable link in the Download tab.
With this change the file name upon download is also changing from <space_key>-<title_of_the_page>-.pdf to <unique_id>.pdf
Please note efforts are underway to reinstate the file name change back to its initial name ( <space_key>-<title_of_the_page>-.pdf ).
As an effort to redesign the backend, we used microservices to export the page. This exported page then gets downloaded as PDF. As we didn’t have complete page tree information that could have contained page title in the beginning of the project, we named the generated pdfs as per their ids instead of their titles.
However, while addressing space exports, we came up with the solution to get the title of the page that we can use for file names at the time of download. But since we already reached our deadline and it’s a very minor change that doesn’t affect the functionality, we decided to add the feature in ongoing sprint (2 weeks from now).
PDF doc name delivery date - 2021-12-21T08:00:00Z or sooner
Why is it changing?
The existing PDF exports were causing a lot of bugs and inaccurate content on exports. That lead to hundreds of customer tickets. Resolving all those tickets one by one was not helping and more bugs were getting raised. Hence, a redesign of the backend flow was adapted as a permanent solution.
What do I need to do?
Nothing. Just look out for errors or inaccurate PDF page export. This backend flow only gets called once you export a Confluence page into a PDF.
If you find something while exporting PDFs including errors and inaccurate export, please raise it in this thread and we will respond.
Rollout dates to be aware of:
- Ecosystem group (ASAP) - 2021-12-08T08:00:00Z - Paused and reverted
- 10% rollout to customers - 2021-12-14T08:00:00Z - Paused and reverted
- 50% rollout to customers - 2021-12-20T08:00:00Z - Paused and reverted
- 100% rollout to customers - 2021-12-27T08:00:00Z - Paused and reverted
Disclaimer - These dates are subject to change in case of any unexpected issues during or before rollout.
IMPORTANT UPDATE : As of Feb 9th 2022, we as a team has decided to pause the rollout and revert Redesigned PDF export utility back to the original implementation for this Quarter due to Render Macro issue and some other blockers which are not in our direct control. We will be resuming potentially by next quarter or until further notice. Thanks!