Add default watchers to the published pages

[Aloren]

When someone comments auto-generated pages -- we would like to have a group of people to be notified of these comments, but it is currently not possible to do via plugin configuration. I was looking into using Add content watcher REST API for these purposes: https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/confluence/rest/#api-user-watch-content-contentId-post The only thing that I don't like about that -- is specifying accountIds of the watchers in configuration. List of UIDs is not very readable :(

@cstettler what do you think?

[tdanylchuk]

Also would be nice to add some watchable labels to such pages instead of particular users/groups, so interested users can subscribe/unsubscribe onto labels and watch all changes of generated docs. In this way we could be much more flexible. Not sure whether it's supported in confluent pages, but it works great in questions where adding label to question summons subscribed users.

[Aloren]

@tdanylchuk Looks like label watching Rest API is available: https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/confluence/rest/#api-user-watch-label-labelName-post

[cstettler]

Hi @Aloren and @tdanylchuk, thanks for opening/commenting this issue. Just to be sure to understand your use case: you would like to automatically register specific users as watchers for the pages your are publishing via the Confluence Publisher?

If so, I am not sure whether such a functionality should be part of the Confluence Publisher, as its main purpose is to convert and publish AsciiDoc content to Confluence, not to provide a "general purpose" client for Confluence. The issue with adding such functionality is the stronger dependency on the Confluence API, especially for more advanced features, and as such, a higher risk that not all features are supported by all Confluence versions still in use.

But in case support for adding simple labels to published pages might help to ease the manual registration for watches, that we might indeed consider. Is this what you @tdanylchuk are talking about? Would that also support your use case @Aloren? Anyway, judging from the Confluence documentation, I have not figured out whether it is actually possible to register a label watcher via the UI. Did you?

[tdanylchuk]

yes, this is an issue that in Confluence we cannot subscribe on labels, but generally next case would be awesome to have (not only related to publisher):

• add possibility to define labels for published pages on publisher side
• add possibility to subscribe on labels, means to watch updates from labeled pages, this change is required from Confluence side, since there is no UI part responsible for this.

So basically we will have next flow:

• users subscribes on label, e.g. generated_docs
• docs are being published with generated_docs label on each of published pages (if defined)
• users subscribed to generated_docs label receive updates.

Makes sense? =)