Adding external links that aren't URLs

[Deleted user]

Hi, I'm currently having an inconvenience when adding "deep links" to a Confluence page. These links pretty much look like URL but use schemes other than "http". For example, a link such as myapp://menu/section is expected to launch our mobile app and automatically redirect users to the specified "menu" and "section".

The problem that I'm having is that regardless the way how I insert the link in the page, it will work fine the first time, but after editing the page (even when leaving the link and everything around it untouched), the link will be gone. That is, the href parameter is removed and even though the text still looks like a hyperlink, it has lost this abilitie for none of the inline tools will show up anymore, nor resaving/previewing the page will add them back. It seems like the server permorms URL validation and removes seemingly "invalid" ones before rendering the editor.

We decided not to use HTML macros or the Source Editor plugin for safety reasons, so editing the HTML markup itself doesn't appear to be an option. So I'm wondering if there's any workaround to make these sort of "custom" hyperlinks stay in place, or if it's a known bug others are also aware of.

Thanks in advance!

[Alistair Edge]

My workaround for slack:// is to use TinyURL.

[Panos]

I did that using the markup macro:

Press the + to expand the macros and select Markup. From the popup dialog select Confluence Wiki and paste this:

[myapp://menu/section]

[Deleted user]

Thanks for your reply. Unfortunately the outcome is the same. The link is correctly added in edit mode and remains usable after the page is saved. But upon editing the page, the URL is gone from the hyperlink.

[Panos]

must be due to different confluence versions. How about you write a little custom macro to do that? You should be able to find documentation easily

[Panos]

Take a look here on how to create it:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/writing-user-macros-4485.html

and create something as simple as:

## @noparams
<a href="myapp://menu/section">myapp://menu/section</a>

this is just a quick way. You can define params and make the link more dynamic. Happy coding ;)

[Deleted user]

This may solve the issue but turns out that User Macros aren't supported by Confluence Cloud (as stated here https://confluence.atlassian.com/conf53/adding-editing-and-removing-user-macros-411108913.html and here https://confluence.atlassian.com/cloud/restricted-functions-in-atlassian-cloud-apps-744721664.html)

I should have specified our Confluence version from the beginning, however I just started getting familiar with the tool.
Reported as a bug and will later post here any updates on the matter. Thanks again for your help!

[Deleted user]

There's an open issue to fix this for Confluence Cloud, whoever interested please vote and follow https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-14393

[Grady Drew]

Thank you for the work-around, but Cloud does not support macros.