Problem

When Collaborative Editing is enabled, editing a page appears to display an old version of the page as the Shared Draft instead of the most recently published version of that page. This can result in changes being made to an old version of the page and then published as the live page.

Cause

At the database level, the contents of the Shared Draft is a copy of the old version of the page.

The scenarios described in CONFSERVER-57458 - Getting issue details... STATUS and in  CONFSERVER-58270 - Getting issue details... STATUS are a way of hitting this problem. We still don't have a full visibility of other scenarios that may trigger it.

Diagnosis

Diagnosis 1

Visually, you are able to identify the difference on the Shared Draft is vastly different to the latest Published copy of the page.

Diagnosis 2

If there are subtle changes in the front end, we can try to inspect the database to check whether the saved draft is actually a copy of an old draft version of the page.

1. Grab the Confluence page ID from the published page we wish to delete the draft from:
   1. Navigate to the published page in Confluence
   2. Hover over the Edit button (but do not click on it)
   3. In the URL status bar, you will see something like http://localhost:8090/pages/editpage.action?pageId=123456
   4. Keep note of the above pageId (i.e. 123456) for the below database SQL

2. Run the following SQL to retrieve all published versions of the page and the active shared draft:

   select * from CONTENT where contentid = <published_pageid> or prevver=<published_pageid>;
   select * FROM BODYCONTENT where contentid in (select contentid from CONTENT where contentid = <published_pageid> or prevver=<published_pageid>);

   
   

   1. This is a sample set of the result set that came back in my local instance for my test pageId 128713064:

      CONTENT:

      contentid	contenttype	hibernateversion	title	lowertitle	version	creator	creationdate	lastmodifer	lastmoddate	prevver	content_status
      128713069	PAGE	35	My Test Page	my test page	1	ff8080004abc958b014ghi002jk10000	2016-12-20 17:06:54.096	ff8080004abc958b014ghi002jk10000	2017-01-03 08:02:44.538	128713064	draft
      128713071	PAGE	16	My Test Page	my test page	1	ff8080004abc958b014ghi002jk10000	2016-12-20 17:01:02.694	ff8080004abc958b014ghi002jk10000	2016-12-20 17:06:50.41	128713064	current
      152438586	PAGE	28	My Test Page	my test page	4	ff8080004abc958b014ghi002jk10000	2016-12-20 17:01:02.694	ff8080004abc958b014ghi002jk10000	2017-01-03 08:02:44.547	128713064	current
      128713064	PAGE	60	My Test Page	my test page	17	ff8080004abc958b014ghi002jk10000	2016-12-20 17:01:02.694	ff8080004abc958b014ghi002jk10000	2018-02-05 15:20:12.06		current

         -  Content Id 128713069 (yellow row): This is the shared draft row and there should only be one content_status='draft' row.
         -  Content Id 128713064 (green row): This is the active published page row and there should only be one row that has content_status='current' and prevver=null for this page.
         - The above remaining rows (white rows) are the historic published page versions.
      
      BODYCONTENT:

      bodycontentid	body	contentid
      128843932	<p class=""auto-cursor-target"">hello world 123<br /></p>	128713069
      128843933	<p class=""auto-cursor-target"">hello world 123<br /></p>	128713071
      152471012	<p class=""auto-cursor-target"">hello world 456<br /></p>	152438586
      128843929	<p class=""auto-cursor-target"">hello world 888<br /></p>	128713064

   2. From the above BODYCONTENT results, assuming there were no changes to the draft, we expected the BODYCONTENT.body for row bodycontentid 128843932 (i.e. the shared draft) to be the same as the BODYCONTENT.body for row bodycontentid 128843929 (i.e. the latest published page) - which it isn't

   3. If we then compare the BODYCONTENT.body with the other BODYCONTENT rows, we find that it is an exact match of bodycontentid 128843933
   4. BODYCONTENT.bodycontentid 128843933 has contentid 128713071 and jumping back to CONTENT.contentid=128713071, this belongs to a hibernateversion 16 which was last modified on 2016-12-20 17:06:50.41!
      
   5. In this specific example, we clearly can see that the shared draft is a copy of an old version of the page
   
   In some cases, in step 2 (c) above, it may not be an exact match if the user had already made significant changes to the draft page. We therefore search for random snippets of BODYCONTENT.body to see how much of the draft page matches to another older draft to identify if the draft was indeed modified from an old draft rather than the latest published page.

Workaround

Workaround 1 - Disable Collaborative Editing

Disabling Collaborative Editing is the fastest temporary work around to ensure only the latest copy of the published page is presented as the editing draft.

• Navigate to Confluence Administration » Collaborative Editing » Disable Collaborative Editing

 Note that turning Collaborative Editing off and on does not fix the problem - re-enabling Collaborative Editing could still bring back the old version of the shared draft.

Workaround 2 - Purge the shared draft for a single page from the database

This work around purges the Shared Draft for a single page so editing that one page will create a new Shared draft based on the latest published copy of that page. This work around will need to be applied to each individual page that you wish to purge the shared draft.

1. Grab the Confluence page ID from the published page we wish to delete the draft from:
   
   1. Navigate to the published page in Confluence
   2. Hover over the Edit button (but do not click on it)
   3. In the URL status bar, you will see something like http://localhost:8090/pages/editpage.action?pageId=nnnnnn
   4. Keep note of the above pageId (i.e. nnnnnn) for the below database SQL
2. Navigate to Confluence Administration » General Configuration » Collaborative Editing » Disable Collaborative Editing
3. Shutdown Confluence
4.  Backup the Confluence Database

5. Run the following SQL to purge out the draft for a single page:

   Substitute <PAGEID> with the above Page ID

   delete from CONFANCESTORS;
   
   delete from CONTENTPROPERTIES where CONTENTID in (select CONTENTID from CONTENT where contenttype = 'PAGE' and content_status = 'draft' and title is not null and prevver is not null and prevver = <PAGEID>);
   
   delete from USERCONTENT_RELATION where targetcontentid in (select CONTENTID from CONTENT where contenttype = 'PAGE' and content_status = 'draft' and title is not null and prevver is not null and prevver = <PAGEID>);
   
   delete from BODYCONTENT where contentid in (select CONTENTID from CONTENT where contenttype = 'PAGE' and content_status = 'draft' and title is not null and prevver is not null and prevver = <PAGEID>);
   
   delete FROM links where contentid in (select CONTENTID from CONTENT where contenttype = 'PAGE' and content_status = 'draft' and title is not null and prevver is not null and prevver = <PAGEID>);
   
   delete from CONTENT where contentid in (select CONTENTID from CONTENT where contenttype = 'PAGE' and content_status = 'draft' and title is not null and prevver is not null and prevver = <PAGEID>);
   
   TRUNCATE TABLE "EVENTS";
   TRUNCATE TABLE "SNAPSHOTS";
   TRUNCATE TABLE "SECRETS";

6. Start up Confluence
7. Rebuild the Ancestor Table
8. Rebuild the search indexes
9. Navigate to Confluence Administration » General Configuration » Collaborative Editing » Enable Collaborative Editing
10. Check that Editing the affected page now brings back the latest version

Workaround 3 - Purge ALL the shared drafts from the database

This work around is the best permanent fix and will restore confidence that editing any page will create a new Shared Draft based on the latest published copy of pages.

1. Ask users to save any content of the draft they wish to keep into a temporary document
2. Follow the instructions at How to remove all shared drafts and start with a clean slate using Collaborative Editing