This documentation is for frevvo v10.1. Not for you? Earlier documentation is available too.

Add-on Installation

Feature Retirement: frevvo for Confluence

Atlassian is dropping support for Confluence Server in 2024 and encouraging customers to migrate to Confluence Cloud. The frevvo plug-in is not compatible with Confluence Cloud. Existing frevvo for Confluence licenses will be supported, but frevvo for Confluence will not be available for new customers.

Please see the frevvo for Confluence page for details about this announcement and recommendations.

frevvo provides an add-on that you can install into Confluence to create sophisticated forms and workflows integrated with Confluence. The add-on requires installation of an in-house frevvo server.

frevvo only supports Confluence Enterprise versions. New Confluence Enterprise version releases will only be certified with the latest frevvo release

Customers must upgrade to the latest major frevvo release compatible with the Confluence Enterprise version

Refer to the Confluence Add on Release Notes for complete compatibility information.

On This Page:


Using an In-house frevvo server

  1. Download and install the frevvo server. Instructions for a Windows platform can be found on the Installation Instructions page. Click here for information on other platforms. 
  2. Setup your In-house frevvo server for Confluence. You must now create a tenant specifically for Confluence. 
  3. See InstallingandConfiguringtheConfluenceadd-on to complete the installation.


Considerations
  1. If you change the value of the session timeout in the Confluence tenant created in frevvo and the server is restarted, forms/workflows in Confluence become inaccessible until the tenant is edited or the server is restarted once again.
  2. If you create a user in Confluence, with the role of frevvo.designer, and then try to login to the Confluence tenant on the frevvo server with this id, an "Invalid username/password" error will display. A password reset on the frevvo server will have to be performed to reset the random password generated when the user was created in Confluence. 

Installing and Configuring the Confluence add-on

Install the add-on

Using UPM:

We strongly recommend using Universal add-on Manager (UPM). Please follow the Atlassian instructions  for adding an add-on. Search for the frevvo frevvo and Workflows for Confluence add-on in UPM, select it and click Install. The add-on will be installed automatically.

Manual Installation

If you cannot use UPM, you can download the frevvo add-on from the Atlassian Marketplace. There are serveral frevvo add-on versions available for Confluence. The add-on version required depends on your Confluence server version number. See the frevvo add-on compatibility matrix for details.

  • Click here to download the correct version of the add-on for your version of frevvo.

Then, follow Atlassian instructions for installing the add-on into Confluence. Remember to first uninstall any previous version.

Configure the add-on

You must first configure the add-on before you can use it. The image below shows the potential configurations available for the frevvo Confluence add-on. The image is large so that the text is readable. In most cases, you will not need to specify these configuration parameters and can leave them blank. Click Configure.

Forms Server URL

This is the scheme, host & port on which the forms server is running. The add-on (installed in Confluence) must be able to access the frevvo server. For example, the URL to your in-house installation might be: http://frevvo.mycompany.com:8082/.

User Name

Enter the tenant admin user for the tenant you created. Remember that you must enter it using the syntax userid@tenant, e.g. admin@mycompany.com

Password

Type in the above admin user's password.

Form Designers Group

You can specify a Confluence group here. If specified, only users belonging to this group can design and add forms, workflows or submissions to Confluence pages. If this is left blank, all Confluence users will be able to  add forms, workflows or submissions to Confluence pages.

Form Users Group

You can specify a Confluence group here. If specified, only users belonging to this group can add the Task List to Confluence pages. If this is left blank, all Confluence users will be able to add the Task List to Confluence pages. Note that all users can still access public forms on public Confluence pages.

Form Editors Group

This feature is available in frevvo v4.1.4 and higher. You can specify a Confluence group here. If specified, users belonging to this group can edit forms and workflows already added to existing Confluence pages belonging to any other user. If this is set to No Group, edit access is restricted to the original designer/owner of the form/workflow. Users belonging to this group can also view/delete submissions for forms and workflows belonging to any other user. Note that the editor also needs to have "designer" privileges for this. This group does not give users permission to create new Confluence pages and add existing forms/workflows created by another designer. The only forms you will see in the add existing form dropdown are the forms created by you.

Another way to give users the ability to edit forms and workflows belonging to other users is to:

  • Add those users to the Who can edit the form/workflow permission in the relevant form/workflow Access Control List. The frevvo.Designer role is only required for these users if a group is specified in the Forms Designer Group field on the Confluence plugin configuration screen. Users to be given this permission must be members of this group.

Confluence Server URL

This is reserved for future use.

Confluence Server External URL

In most cases, you do not need to configure this.

In some configurations, the URL used by a browser outside the firewall to access Confluence may be rewritten before it is internally passed on to Confluence. If that's the case, Confluence URLs generated by frevvo to perform any redirection will be wrong since they will reflect the rewritten internal URL. You can specify the externally visible URL to Confluence here. If not specified, this will be inferred from the HTTP Request received by Confluence.

Forms Server External URL

In most cases, you do not need to configure this.

In some configurations, the externally visible URL to the forms server may be different from the above URL, i.e. the URL that a browser outside the firewall uses to access frevvo could be different from the URL that the add-on (inside the firewall) uses to access frevvo.  If that's the case, enter the externally visible URL in this configuration parameter. Your users must be able to access the frevvo server from their browsers via this URL. When the  form, workflow or task list is rendered in the browser, this URL will be used to access frevvo. This URL defaults to the above Forms Server URL if not specified.

Frevvo supports confluence over SSL. If Confluence is running over ssl, you must configure the Form Server External URL in the Confluence add-on to your frevvo Server url. This URL will help to render forms/workflows on Confluence pages properly.  You also need to configure the 'Confluence Server Url' in the tenant you have set up specifically for Confluence. In the frevvo Server, edit the tenant and set the 'Confluence Server Url' to your HTTPS Confluence site. See Manage Tenants for more information. With both of these settings configured, you should be able to access/create forms on Confluence pages.

Enable Debugging

If checked, the add-on will print debugging information to Confluence pages. In addition, for forms and workflows, you can also specify a parameter to the form macro that is generated in Confluence pages: _norender:true. If this parameter is present, the macro will simply print debugging information but will not actually render the form.

Click the Save Configuration button. If all goes well, the message "add-on configuration updated" should be displayed. You may now logout of the Confluence admin account.

Administration

HTTP Configuration

The add-on makes HTTP requests to the frevvo server, which may be remote in order to process your form. If you find that the frevvo macros do not work, ask your network administrator if Confluence needs to access the Internet through a web proxy.

Please refer to Configure Web Proxy Support for Confluence for further information.

Login to Form Server

There are occasions where you may want to login directly to the frevvo server rather than via Confluence. Here are a few points to understand:

  1. All Confluence users who create forms and workflows automatically have their user account created on the frevvo server. In order to login directly to the form server, you must first login as the frevvo admin and then use the login as that user feature available to the admin user to next login to the specific user account.
  2. All forms and workflows are created under Application 1 in the frevvo user account of the same username as the username of the Confluence user who first created the form or workflow.

Known Issues

Internet Explorer

If you get this error adding a workflow to a Confluence page you can solve this with a simple browser setting.

Internet explorer has modified this page to prevent cross site scripting

Go to IE Tools -> Internet options -> Security tab -> select custom level -> disable XSS Filter

In some browsers forms may not display due to the browser blocking unsafe scripts. Refer to your browser's documentation for details to enable them, or run frevvo over https with a self-signed certificate ( until you have purchased an authority signed certificate.)