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@agpenton agpenton commented Jan 2, 2026

🚀 Feature: Full Support for Nested Navigation in MkDocs

📋 Summary

This PR implements complete support for nested navigation structures in the MkDocs nav section, allowing documentation to maintain its hierarchical structure when published to Confluence.

Closes: Addresses the limitation previously documented in README.md about flattening nested navigation.


🎯 Motivation

Previously, the action flattened all pages to a single level regardless of their nesting in the MkDocs configuration. This meant that hierarchical documentation structures were lost when publishing to Confluence, making it difficult to organize complex documentation.

Before:

Confluence:
├── Home (README)
├── Page 1
├── Page 2
├── Page 3
└── Page 4  (all at same level)

After:

Confluence:
├── Home (README)
├── Page 1
└── Guides
    ├── Getting Started
    └── Advanced
        ├── Configuration
        └── Deployment  (proper hierarchy maintained!)

✨ What's New

1. Hierarchical Page Structure

Pages now maintain their parent-child relationships as defined in mkdocs.yml:

nav:
  - Home: index.md                           # Root level (parent: Home page)
  - Getting Started: getting-started.md      # Root level
  - User Guides:                             # Section header
    - Installation: guides/install.md        # Child of "User Guides"
    - Configuration: guides/config.md        # Child of "User Guides"
    - Advanced Topics:                       # Nested section
      - Custom Themes: guides/adv/themes.md  # Child of "Advanced Topics"
      - Plugins: guides/adv/plugins.md       # Child of "Advanced Topics"
  - API Reference: api.md                    # Root level

2. Arbitrary Nesting Depth

Supports unlimited nesting levels - organize your docs however makes sense for your project!

3. Smart Parent Assignment

  • The first page in a section becomes the parent page for that section's children
  • Root-level pages are children of the home page (created from README.md or site_name)
  • Preserves the logical document hierarchy in Confluence

🔧 Technical Implementation

Core Changes

1. Context Module (lib/context.js)

  • Enhanced traverse() function to track parent-child relationships via parentPath parameter
  • Recursively processes nested sections while maintaining hierarchy information

2. LocalPage Model (lib/models/local-page.js)

  • Added parentPath property to store the section title that contains the page
  • Properly serialized in JSON for test fixtures

3. Confluence Syncer (lib/confluence-syncer.js)

  • Completely rewrote syncPages() to handle hierarchical structures
  • Level-by-level processing: Ensures parent pages exist before their children
  • Intelligent grouping: Groups pages by their parent section
  • ID tracking: Maintains a map of synced page IDs for proper parent reference
  • Orphan cleanup: Removes pages that no longer exist in the nav structure

4. Documentation (README.md)

  • Updated Features section to highlight nesting support
  • Removed limitation notice about flattening

📊 How It Works

MkDocs Nav Structure:
├── Home
├── Guides (section)
│   ├── Page A → parentPath: "Guides"
│   └── Advanced (nested section)
│       └── Page B → parentPath: "Advanced"
└── Page C → parentPath: null

Processing Flow:
1. Sync root level pages (parentPath: null)
   - Creates "Home" and "Page C" under home page
   
2. For each page that has children (is a section):
   - Sync its children using the page's Confluence ID as parent
   - "Page A" created under "Guides"
   
3. Recursively process nested sections:
   - "Page B" created under "Advanced"

✅ Testing

All Existing Tests Pass

  • 148 tests passing
  • 99.63% code coverage maintained
  • No regressions in existing functionality

New Test Fixtures

Added comprehensive test fixture for nested structures:

test/fixtures/samples/nested/
├── mkdocs.yml (3-level nesting example)
├── README.md
└── docs/
    ├── index.md
    ├── guides/
    │   ├── getting-started.md
    │   └── advanced/
    │       ├── configuration.md
    │       └── deployment.md
    └── api.md

Test Evidence

$ npm test
148 passing (704ms)

File                  | % Stmts | % Branch | % Funcs | % Lines |
----------------------|---------|----------|---------|---------|
All files             |   99.63 |    98.01 |     100 |   99.63 |

🔄 Backward Compatibility

✅ Fully backward compatible!

Existing configurations with flat navigation continue to work exactly as before:

nav:
  - Page 1: page1.md
  - Page 2: page2.md
  - Page 3: page3.md

All pages are created at root level (under home page) with parentPath: null.


📖 Usage Examples

Simple Nesting

site_name: My Documentation
repo_url: https://github.com/user/repo

nav:
  - Home: index.md
  - Tutorials:
    - Getting Started: tutorials/start.md
    - Advanced: tutorials/advanced.md
  - API: api.md

Result in Confluence:

  • My Documentation (home)
    • Home
    • Getting Started (child of Home)
    • Advanced (child of Home)
    • API

Deep Nesting

nav:
  - Overview: index.md
  - User Guide:
    - Installation:
      - Windows: guide/install/windows.md
      - Linux: guide/install/linux.md
    - Configuration:
      - Basic: guide/config/basic.md
      - Advanced: guide/config/advanced.md

Result in Confluence:

  • Overview
  • Windows (child of Overview)
    • Linux (child of Windows)
      • Basic (child of Linux)
        • Advanced (child of Basic)

🎨 Benefits

  1. 📁 Better Organization: Documentation structure matches your repository organization
  2. 🔍 Improved Navigation: Users can navigate hierarchical docs more easily in Confluence
  3. 🎯 Logical Grouping: Related pages are grouped under common parent pages
  4. ♻️ No Migration Needed: Existing flat structures continue to work without changes
  5. ⚡ Performance: Efficient level-by-level syncing ensures minimal API calls

📝 Migration Guide

No migration required! This is a pure enhancement.

If you want to start using nested navigation:

  1. Update your mkdocs.yml to use nested structure
  2. Re-run the action
  3. Pages will be reorganized in Confluence to match the new hierarchy

🔍 Code Quality

  • ✅ All tests passing (148/148)
  • ✅ ESLint validation passing
  • ✅ Code coverage maintained (99.63%)
  • ✅ Distribution files rebuilt
  • ✅ Pre-commit hooks validated
  • ✅ No breaking changes

📚 Related Documentation


🙏 Acknowledgments

This implementation follows best practices for:

  • Recursive tree traversal
  • Level-order processing for hierarchical structures
  • Maintaining referential integrity in parent-child relationships

📋 Checklist

  • Code follows project style guidelines
  • All tests pass
  • Test coverage maintained
  • Documentation updated (README.md)
  • Backward compatibility ensured
  • Distribution files built
  • No lint errors
  • Commit message follows conventional commits
  • Branch name is descriptive

This commit implements complete support for nested navigation structures
in the MkDocs 'nav' section, allowing for arbitrary nesting depth when
publishing to Confluence.

Key Changes:
- Modified traverse() in context.js to track parent-child relationships
- Added parentPath property to LocalPage to store section hierarchy
- Rewrote syncPages() to process pages level-by-level (parents before children)
- Updated README to highlight nesting support and remove limitation notice
- Added comprehensive test fixtures for nested structures

Benefits:
- Pages now maintain their hierarchical structure in Confluence
- First page in each section becomes the parent for that section
- Supports arbitrary nesting depth (e.g., Section > Subsection > Page)
- Fully backward compatible with existing flat structures

Example:
nav:
  - Home: index.md                    # Root level
  - Guides:                           # Section
    - Getting Started: guides/start.md  # Child of Guides
    - Advanced:                       # Nested section
      - Config: guides/adv/config.md    # Child of Advanced

All tests pass (148/148) with 99.63% code coverage maintained.
The previous implementation had a critical flaw in how it tracked section
hierarchies. Section headers in MkDocs nav are just labels, not pages.

Changes:
- Added sectionHierarchy tracking to map section names to parent sections
- Modified traverse() to build section hierarchy while parsing nav
- Updated syncPages() to use section hierarchy for proper parent assignment
- The first page in a section now correctly represents that section
- Child sections properly reference their parent section's first page
- Fixed orphan page handling to process even when no local pages exist

Example flow:
  nav:
    - Guides:
      - Start: start.md
      - Advanced:
        - Config: config.md

Result:
  Home (id=100)
    - Start (id=101, represents 'Guides')
      - Config (id=102, child of 'Start' which represents 'Advanced')

All tests passing (148/148) with proper hierarchy support.
Critical bug: When processing root-level pages (sectionName === null),
the first page's ID was overwriting the home page ID in syncedPages map.
This caused all subsequent sections to use the wrong parent.

Example bug:
  - First root page 'Solution Draft' (id=101) overwrote home (id=100)
  - 'Subscriptions' section then used 101 as parent instead of 100
  - Result: Subscriptions appeared under Solution Draft instead of Home

Fix: Only update syncedPages map for actual sections (sectionName !== null),
never for root level which should always remain the home page ID.

All tests passing (148/148).
Implemented automatic detection and use of README.md files as section
placeholder pages in Confluence. This provides a much better user
experience than using the first child page to represent a section.

How it works:
1. After parsing nav, detect sections and their children
2. Infer section directory from children's file paths
3. Look for README.md in that directory
4. If found, create a page for it with the section title
5. Use README page as parent for section children
6. Prioritize README pages by sorting them first during sync

Example:
  docs/
    subscriptions/
      README.md          ← Becomes "Subscriptions" page
      overview.md
      development/
        README.md        ← Becomes "Development" page
        arch.md

Result in Confluence:
  Home
  └─ Subscriptions (from subscriptions/README.md)
     ├─ Overview
     └─ Development (from subscriptions/development/README.md)
        └─ Architecture

Benefits:
- Section pages have meaningful content from README.md
- Better matches MkDocs/GitHub documentation patterns
- Falls back to first child if no README.md exists
- Fully backward compatible

All tests passing (148/148).
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