Problem

Children Display Macro show pages on wrong depth when confluence.child-macro.page-limit is set on JVM parameters and "Depth of Descendants" is set on Children Display Macro

Environment

Confluence Server and Data Center 7.13 and 7.19.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Stop Confluence and add the Children Display Macro page limit system parameter

   CATALINA_OPTS="-Dconfluence.child-macro.page-limit=4 ${CATALINA_OPTS} 

2. Start Confluence
3. Create a Parent page
4. Create more than 4 children pages for the parent page
5. For the first children page create other child page and a child of the child until have at least 4 depths
6. This is how page tree should look like:
   
7. On Parent page add a Children Display Macro
8. Set "Depth of Descendants" to 3, save the changes.

Expected Results

Considering the page tree image above this is how Children Display Macro show be limiting page by 4 and depth by 3:

Actual Results

Children Display Macro is breaking layout adding the first depth of pages under the second level of pages:

Workaround

Option 1

Remove Children Display Macro limit page system parameter from Confluence configuration:

CATALINA_OPTS="-Dconfluence.child-macro.page-limit=4 ${CATALINA_OPTS}

Option 2

Limit the Max Depth of Descendants to 1. If users set a higher value it will be ignored, no depth will be show and issue will not happen.

CATALINA_OPTS="-Dconfluence.child-macro.max-depth=1 ${CATALINA_OPTS}" 

Notes