Upcoming changes to Confluence Cloud REST APIs to modernize search

Atlassian will update how we return paginated results for our REST APIs from an index based system to a cursor based system.

REST APIs changing

In the JSON response of each API, there is a _links section that holds next and prev URLs. These URLs have several query parameters, some of which are changing:

The start query parameter is deprecated and will be removed on July 15th, 2020.

Response Changes

To make sure your search code continues to work before, during, and after this change, use the prev and next links returned in the HTTP response instead of constructing them yourself. Here is a sample showing the old link format:

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{
  "results": [
    { ... },
    { ... },
    ...
    { ... }
  ],
  "limit": 25,
  "size": 25,
  ...
  "_links": {
    "base": "<url>",
    "context": "<url>",
    "prev": "/rest/api/search?limit=25&start=0&cql=space=XYZ&status=draft",
    "next": "/rest/api/search?limit=25&start=50&cql=space=XYZ&status=draft",
    "self": "<url>"
  }
}

Once the changes are rolled out, the prev and next URLs will contain a cursor instead. Example:

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"/rest/api/search?limit=25&cursor=raNDoMsTRiNg&cql=space=XYZ&status=draft"