projectdoc Toolbox

The projectdoc Toolbox makes it easy to search for documents with a given set of constraints in an ancestor context.

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This tip shows how users of the projectdoc Toolbox for Confluence can constrain their searches to documents that have a property value that is in an ancestor context.

Ancestor Context

What is a property value in an ancestor context?

Documents can be set in a hierarchy. If documents are referenced as property values, the hierarchy of these documents may be of interest in queries.

 

It is important to note that we refer to the hierarchy of a property value of a document. The hierarchy the document is part of is not important for the ancestor context.

The ancestor context can be traversed from the root to the leaves (downstream) or from a node to its root (upstream).

Tags Example

Suppose you have a Tag document named 'Domain'. There you have subdocuments for 'Security', 'Performance', and 'Fault Tolerance'. Child tags of 'Security' are 'SSL', 'Authentication',and 'Authorization'.

Suppose you have created these topics, associated with the given tags:

Topic TitleTags
Secure PasswordsAuthentication
Transport SecuritySSL
Role Model for Application AAuthorization
Security Basics for DummiesSecurity

Now you want to list all documents related to 'Security':

$<Tags>=°Security°

This selects all documents tagged with 'Security' or one of its descendants.

Roles Example

Suppose you have Role documents for Customer, User, and Operations. Operations has child documents System Admin, Application Admin, and Support. Application Admin is subdivided into Application A Admin, Application B Admin, and Application C Admin.

Suppose further that you provide documentation for people in those roles. Therefore you create instances of the doctype Topic. A topic provides a document property called Audience to define the roles this topic is relevant for.

Topic TitleAudience
Ops BasicsOperations
Support TopicsSupport
Common Configuration Options for ApplicationsApplication Admin
Configuration Options for Application BApplication B Admin

Now you want to list all documents relevant for Application Admins. This should include all generic documents, but not documents for specific applications.

$<Audience>=^Application Admin^

This will select all documents for the Audience 'Application Admin' and its ancestors (Operations and Role).



Ancestor Definition

Ancestor queries are based on the property information in the blueprint of a document type. Document authors cannot define hierarchies based on document instances. It is the job of template authors to do this, using the property parameter of the Name List Macro (or its relatives).

If you encounter unexpected results with upstream queries, you may want to refresh the doctype cache. This cache collects the relation information from the blueprints. Please refer to Cache Refresh Actions for details on how to access this cache.

Resources

Here is more information related to searches with the projectdoc Toolbox.

Search Tips
Tips on specifying search queries for Lucene. This also applies to projectdoc's query macros.
Subtree Queries
The projectdoc Toolbox makes it easy to search for documents with a given set of constraints in a document tree with a given root.