Why has this ticket been languishing? The recommendation provided would actually make variables usable inside templates! I have innumerable use cases for dynamically populating macro parameters. One in particular, is the Jira macro that brings in a list of Jira issues based on a specified JQL statement. These cap out at 1000 issues, and they bog down the load times of pages to an almost unusable level. Being able to dynamically change the filter queries from a variable would be a tremendous difference. 

The comment above describes exactly what we need for our Release Note process. We build and release many different releases every week and manually updating the embedded Jira link macros with the appropriate client and fix version is massively time consuming and error prone.  The ability to use a page variable (or similar) to build the Jira query links would be so useful.

I have the need to have on a page template a bunch of macros driven by JQL, and all the JQL need to reference a value that I would like to pull from a page variable, so the user does not need to edit the JQL of every macro on the page.  For example a Release Notes page template that contains a bunch of macros querying Jira for counts of issues, all of which need in the JQL "version=@version" where @version is a page variable that the user only would need to specify once for all the macros on the page to function automatically without having to update each macro individually.

make it work for the cloud @info927

With our Page Tree Creator you can use tags (variables) in the page title, on the page and also in macro parameters.
Give it a try: Page Tree Creator Marketplace link
or try our Live Examples

The fact that this is considered a suggestion rather than a basic feature baffles me as well. I went through the process of creating a template that used some JIRA chart macros, and originally I thought I must have the syntax wrong when I referenced a template variable to represent my JIRA project. It really surprised and disappointed me that I wasted a lot of time setting up the template only to realize that I will have to individually modify the same value in 6 different places within my page (in the macro code) to represent the JIRA project EVERY time. Yuck. With literally hundreds of projects, I thought it would be a nobrainer to set up a template that every team could easily use. Very disappointed.

I have attempted a workaround in a user macro. I have posted it here: https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/141785/answers/30948374
It is not ideal in the sense that JIRA macros rendered in a user macro $body does not work alongside with sectioned layouts.
But it may have it's purposes anyhow.

This seems like a very basic feature.

Jens,

I'm not sure it is an improvement, it is more a feature lost.

I have created several page templates for which the page creator was invited to set the JIRA project KEY in a variable and it was automatically injecting this value in JIRA filter gadgets and creating a link to project repository.
And the user was able to rework on the called gadget at the page template level and at the page level too.

Today the mitigation to obtain the same behaviour is to develop a Blueprint, and not entirely because the user won't be able to modify the filter at the blueprint level. For the end users it is hard to swallow.

Best Regards, hope we will soon have back the capability to inject $variable inside macros.

Our organization of 500+ users is evaluating this tool. Up until I ran into this problem, I was very enthusiastic. In the past week, I have created literally hundereds of pages that when put together on one page creates a very maintainable / updatable enterprise wiki. After creating the strucuture, I needed to create combined views usng the 'Include Page' macro. I had specifically named all of the structural pages so that I could enter a variable into a template with include macros pulling from every divisions tailored pages..... and nothing.

My question to Atlassian is this: Why do you not think this is important enough to work on? If your not going to work on it; why haven't you created a workaround or addressed some of the very specific questions here.

I know our annual bill for JIRA, AgileJIRA and Confluence is a pretty penny. We have support folks trying to convince leadership that we can do all of the Atlassian functionality in SharePoint. Your most zealous users; your most knowledgable users make up the voices in this thread. If you lose them....you lose entire accounts.

Thats real money.

Absolutely amazing. Never used Confluence before, evaluating it as a replacement to mediawiki. In the first hour of playing with the Blueprints feature I ran into this issue. Amazing it's been open this long and with so many votes, and no timeline or work done on it. What's the point of a template if you can't use variables to substitute into links and macros? The template becomes completely useless for any page that isn't basic formatted text. I just don't understand how this could be considered as a "nice to have some day" kind of feature!

I'm waiting for this feature, since the new editor is avaiable. Please fix this problem.

yeah that would be great to have.. now hoping atlassian sees this and works on this again.

I would like this for pre-populated JIRA reports macro. I have a page template that has three separate jira reports on it, all running slightly different querys, all having a different set of displayed fields. I'd like to be able to specify the one user-provided variable once and have all three jira macros use the same variable (sprint name).

I also need a workaround for this. If anyone knows any updates on this I'd appreciate it.

This is real bad for us too, hard to understand why this is not functionnal anymore

This has been plaguing us since we upgraded as well. Initially we had to setup all of our templates inside of run macros to replace the parameters as our workaround, but this was causing issues with our use of the excerpt macro not working when used inside other macros. Right now our clunky workaround is that we have to create the page, then edit the source code and use find/replace to populate our macros parameters. Not a great solution for the end users creating these pages.

Today I stumbled into this bug, too:
We want our users to be able to create a page from a template, fill it with content and then export it with scroll office in a word document.
For the creation of the word document we need some metadata, stored with the metadata-plugin macro, which the user has to mostly edit manually for every document.
My idea was to use variables ($var) inside the macros in the template so that the user can enter all the metadata within a nice form while creating the page from the template.
But this seems not possible, as variables inside macros are deleted when saving the template.

@john masson [atlassian]
Can you let us know if there is an alternative to some of the issues being described?

My main questions would be: Is there a possibility to make unique links in a template. We want to set up a structure with our documentation for applications, and want the same child pages with a unique identifier for each application. Maybe through a variable or with some sort of "self.newlink", so the name of the parent page will be in front of the child page?
To do this manually is not efficient and too prone to errors.

Thanks for everyone who has added details on how they would use this, it's very, very useful for us to understand the problems you have so we can solve them the right way.

freakb, to answer your question, we don't currently have time scheduled to look at this. The ticket remains open as I can see this as something we may consider doing at some point, but I can't give you any estimate of when sorry.

It has gotten very quiet since the person from atlassian asked us about this issue. Now I see multiple new issues have been raised and they have all been closed pointing at this one.
Does that mean someone will actually look into this sometime soon?
This is functionality which we are severely missing at this time.

The issue recently hit us too. Imho it should be possible to use parameters elsewhere in template body. Currently the parameter feature causes more confusion than benefit and should be consequently dropped if there is no will to implement it right.

This is an additional topic where existing base functionality will be ruined by new CF versions that add a whole bunch of new social features to the game at the same time. This behaviour is not my understanding of an enterprise wiki system!

We require variables to work when creating link's. At the moment the variables do not work at all for links.

i am running into this problem from the day i migrated. unfortunatly after soo long i and many other cannot perform a simple function

• make a page template
  • add a var
    • add this var in all the macro's

• create a page from the template with prefilled content in macro's .. the basic macro's like simply filter the content by a label i guess hte most basic function you would really expect here..

in other words i had a good fucntioning running wiki with templates, business processes.. and after the upgrade it all stopped. rendering confluence just about non functional..

can anyone of the atlassian staff please look at this and give it some priority!?

ps: this not an improvement.. its a bug because it was functional in the previous releases?

Thanks

We also need both – we ask the user to enter the values for a few variables at the top of the page, and that drives a lot of the content we're pulling in from other sources (e.g. from jira using the jiraissues macro) in the rest of the page.

variables are important for both links and macros.

In our case (2000 users for evaluation then growing to 8000) we found the need for structured page layouts for defined topic pages like abbreviation, glossary, project, howtos, backround knowledge, roles, ... When creating pages with these templates it is extremly useful to provide automatic links e.g. feed-links (they are dependent on $spaceKey). Letting users manually generate a feed does not attract them to use feeds since it's less comfortable because mails bounce in automatically. For defined structures it is important to deliver watching possibilities next to the content related to the content. We don't want to teach watching pages but watching topics collected by labels representing a topic. Then we are able to deliver automatically answers for questions since the topic is know to the questioner but not the person that answers. So posting questions via blogs stating the topic of a question by label let's pop up the question at those people's dashboards that are dealing with it - officially and by interest. No need for organizational effort!

The other important fact is populating the page with existing content related to the topic using makros like blog post (related questions), content-by-label (related pages), contributors (related sharing key persons) etc. All these macros are space or topic dependent so I do need the variables to avoid additional workload to add macros to each new page. The macros automatically link everything when labelled properly.

We need both!

For us, having variables supply parameters to macros is just as important, as to links.

We've come to rely on multiexcerpt-include macros – sometimes as much as 25 on a page – to work around limitations with other plugins – e.g., Scaffolding not being compatible with the Page Report macro – and it would be useful to have a variable feed the page name to the macro.

It would be nice to include links from a page to parent or child page as well as to itself.

We try to keep a very similar look and feel of the pages we have. For every page we make we want it to be easy to make childrenpages with the right names and links ready to be clicked.
This was done with the variables as done above. Now we have to first still use the old way of using variables, then we need to copy all the text (wiki markup) and insert it as wiki markup. This is an annoying extra thing to do every time (and to explain to everyone how to do it).

To us (about 400 users) variables in Links is most important.
Glad it is being looked at!

For me it's both links and macros.
For example, a useful case is creating a page for a customer based on some parameters. In the past, I used the form to provide 5 parameters or so, for example the customer SAP ID. Than I could automatically create links to external systems that can use this ID in the URL, and at the same time create JIRA macros with a query, embedding a table with their current and past issues.
I could also automatically add labels with these params, useful in dynamic lists that show me different cuts of customers according to criteria.

Now it is a painful 10-step manual process to create each page! if we wouldn't have managed to jump start that project with the earlier version we'd never have considered going through such painful work, now we're stuck with either letting it all rot, or living with the pain.
This is just one advanced example, we used such tricks all over the place.

Blueprints seem nice, and seem useful for some cases - but where variables were useful are those creative no-programming mini-systems that worked great to get people to participate. I can think of about half a dozen different use cases I came up with myself that aren't one of the common blueprints.

Thanks for the comments all.

Is having variables in links the main concern for the majority of you still? The original description is of course for links and macro parameters but it seems like links is the more important to most of you?

We don't have a timeframe to start working on it, but it is something we're aware of, and as we expand what's possible with the Blueprints that were introduced in 5.1, it is something we want to spend some time on investigating further.

Confluence 4.2 supported the ability to define variables in hyperlinks in a page template. We could define a variable (i.e. @XXX@) and put a link using the variable in the template like so:
[Reference Page|https://confluence.mycompany.com/display/req/@XXX@-1+Reference+Page]

When creating a page from a template utilizing this ability, after the user enters the variable (i.e. 'ABC'), the new page is generated with a valid link (replacing the variable):
Reference Page

This functionality is now totally GONE with 5.1 without any suggestions from Atlassian as to how to provide this ability.

This basically renders Confluence useless for my team.

Can't you give access to the meta-data string, from the editor for user made macros, like you do for the ones shipped with confluence https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Confluence+Wiki+Markup+for+Macros that would solve allot of problems for us?

I just saw that a new issue reported as a copy of this issue has been closed saying it's a duplicate.
Even though this problem has been here since version 1.x
The new problem for not being able to use the workaround in the newer versions is a problem they should work on in my opinion.
So the type improvement should change to something more severe.

The trouble is - if attlassian doesn't acknowledge the workaround (in version 3) as a valid use case, we might have to wait another 8 years with no progress. From where I stand, there's a serious regression in what version 4 can do, even if the editing is easier for the majority of users.

Ahh had not thought about that yet. We're going to upgrade to the newest version soon and did not calculate that our templates will stop working.
Maybe we can bump this thread back to life so that we can make variables into links.

This workaround always felt like a temporary thing but worked well for the time being

This kind of workaround worked very well (even if the template was a big ugly), and we could do all kinds of very smart automatic pages, especially with the jira integration, manipulating JQLs, wiki links and external URLs...
Now confluence (version 4.3.2 with it's no-markup approach) is significantly less powerful for us.

I've found one way to make these kind of links happen.
If you make a variable which completes the link they will be made fine.
I wanted a variable (unique) code to automatically make children pages when you click the links.
The way i made a template was as follows:
In this case @Blokhaak@ needs to be filled with [
and @CODE@ is the unique code we wanted

@Blokhaak@Product Specificatie | @CODE@.11 Product Specificatie]
@Blokhaak@Versie | @CODE@.12 Versie]

This is a workaround, though I have noticed a problem occuring lately that a \ is inserted before the |
Does anyone know what might be causing this?
(using version 3.1, it worked fine before, just started to happen lately.. can't think what changed that made the problem occur)

Not being able to use variables inside of macros renders templating for anything beyond basic text pretty much useless. Please fix this in the next version, though that it's been broken for nearly 3 years doesn't make me optimistic.

The original issue was created in 2004.
This issue still exists in 2.1.3 and I'm guessing 2.4.2 as well.
It seems to me as though templates are broken without this being fixed.

This is still broken 2.0 too. I just ran into it myself.