How to generate Confluence page based on tabular data - confluence

Question

I have some tabular data about users. I would like to have a Confluence page generated based on it. But I don't want to show the data as it is but instead have a nice table made of it.
For example data includes user identifier. But on the page I would like to have it used for few things. For example make an anchor to the user entry/row, show the identifier in a column and generate link (in another column) to some other tools where the identifier is an argument in URL.
This goes in obvious direction of data vs. presentation separation with all its benefits.
Now the problem is that I don't know how to do that while I feel that it should be somehow possible with all that Confluence offers.
There are various reporting macros. But the problem is how to get the initial tabular data. I tried using Excel (or CSV) attachment. But I failed to extract data from it (otherwise than just showing a simple table based on it).
Any advice? I'm using Confluence 5.4.
I have asked about it previously on Atlassian Answers in question Reporting on spreadsheet data from attachment but there are no answers so far and I think there will be none. While I think Stack Overflow is more popular so I hope that maybe here someone will have any advices.

Answer 1

For the 'display table information on the page' part: This could be achieved with a user macro. The CSV macro and HTML macro can be used to pull data in from an attachment or other locations to display on a wiki page.
There are other ways to display this kind of data. This be done with information extracted from a database using the SQL macro. Confluence can read in from its own database or from external databases.
For example, let's say you wanted to list all pages in a space with hyperlinks using the key page information to edit, view, delete the target page. The information being extracted in this example is in the Confluence table.
{sql-query:dataSource=wiki|output=wiki}
SELECT
'['||B.spacename||'|'||B.spacekey||':]' "Space Name",
'['||A.parentid ||'|///pages/viewpage.action?pageId='||A.parentid||']' "Page Parent",
'['||A.contentid||'|///pages/viewpage.action?pageId='||A.contentid||']' "Page Id",
'['||A.title ||'|///viewpage.action?pageId='||A.contentid||']' "Page Title",
'[View Page |///pages/viewpage.action?pageId='||A.contentid||']' "View Page",
'[Edit Page |///pages/editpage.action?pageId='||A.contentid||']' "Edit Page",
'[Delete Page |///pages/removepage.action?pageId='||A.contentid||']' "Delete Page"
FROM wiki.CONTENT A, SPACES B
WHERE B.SPACEKEY = 'sp' -- Put the spacekey here
AND B.SPACEID = A.SPACEID
AND A.TITLE like '%this%' -- Optionally, only return results for pages with the word 'this' in them
-- AND A.CONTENTID = 125999877 -- optionally, only return results for a single page by id
ORDER BY A.TITLE
{sql-query}
Once you have the content on the page it is possible to post-render wiki content using a JavaScript via the html macro.
{html}
<script type="text/javascript">
AJS.$(document).ready(function() {
AJS.$('#tableid').find('tr > td').contents().html('Hello world'); // or whatever to find and change the html or text
});
</script>
{html}

Answer 2

I presume your Confluence is version 4 or later. The default editor is WISIWYG, but you can also enable Source Editor (read Confluence doc on how to do this).
You can create source of a page in external editor and then copy/paste it in to Confluence Source Editor (or use Confluence REST API if you need to import multiple files).
Create a page with sample table, then view source of this page. Copy/paste elements of this page to your tabular data. Use search and replace patterns to insert tags in right places.
For example, if you have CSV file:
- replace commas with </th><th>
- put <tr><th> at the start of each line
- put </th><tr> at the end of each line
This should create nice table in Confluence.