Upgrading from Confluence 3.5.1 to 4.2.5 breaks all of our links to networked files and folders

[Dave Donnelly _Sensata_]

One of the uses we have for Confluence is to use it as a reference to documentation held on our network drives. This is an essential piece for functionality for us. I recently upgraded our Confluence instance from 3.5.1 to 4.2.5 and this had the effect of un-rendering all of the network hyperlinks and causing them to be displayed as text.

An example of the types of urls that encountered a problem are:

{noformat} /////network_drive/folder1/folder2 {noformat}

and

{noformat} //C:/folder1/folder2 {noformat}

and

{noformat} network_drive folder1 folder2 file.doc {noformat}

and here is a real one

{noformat} here| selanas02 ECUSystemDesign Systems Engineering Team Customer-independent Projects Presentations Demo_FrequencyResponseInvestigation_28Feb2012.pptx {noformat}

[Mark Hrynczak · Accepted solution]

This ability is not currently available in Confluence 4.x.

There is an open feature request where this is being discussed: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-24665

The workaround, as mentioned on that ticket, is to insert the links within an HTML macro. Note that is a security risk, and you should decide whether you want to enable it on your instance.

[Dave Donnelly _Sensata_]

Thanks for that Mark. We require something automated to convert the links in our, already substantial, Confluence instance. I upgraded to 4.2 and there was nearly a riot! We're back using 3.5.1 for the moment until this is resolved. Cheers for the link.

[Dave Donnelly _Sensata_]

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-23575 here is another related issue.

[Thomas Schlegel]

I don't think that this will be fixed (CONF-23575). It has a low priority for Atlassian, which I think is not correct. We also have a lot of links to documents in our filesystem. I cannot move to Confluence 4 if there is no solution for that. If this will not be fixed, sooner or later I have to look around for alternatives.

[Dave Donnelly _Sensata_]

It would be terribly unfortunate for us if this issue is not resolved. This blocks us upgrading to Confluence 4.x entirely. Surely this sort of network links functionality is commonplace for users' Confluence instances?

[Thomas Schlegel]

Atlassian has upgraded the issue CONF-23575. It is now a major bug, no minor anymore :-)

[Dave Donnelly _Sensata_]

Progress! :)

[Dave Donnelly _Sensata_]

Well that didn't format correctly at all. This is an automatic post generated when I raised a ticket with Atlassian. The blanks in file paths above are supposed to be back slashes...