Exception: key should not be null!

Owned by Tibor Hegyi
Last updated: Jul 29, 2020 by Balázs SzakálVersion comment
1 min read

Problem

Error  "key should not be null" appears in the log files and emails are not processed by Email This Issue. 

Typical stacktrace in the logs.

2016-10-31 12:31:00,617 atlassian-scheduler-quartz1.clustered_Worker-3 ERROR anonymous IT-Helpdesk [atlassian.mail.incoming.mailfetcherservice] IT-Helpdesk[13000]: Exception: key should not be null!
com.atlassian.jira.util.dbc.Assertions$NullArgumentException: key should not be null!
at com.atlassian.jira.util.dbc.Assertions.notNull(Assertions.java:29)
at com.atlassian.jira.user.DelegatingApplicationUser.<init>(DelegatingApplicationUser.java:20)
at com.atlassian.jira.user.util.DefaultUserManager.getAllApplicationUsers(DefaultUserManager.java:105)
at com.metainf.jira.plugin.emailissue.handler.EmailThisIssueMailHandler.filterForUsers(EmailThisIssueMailHandler.java:786)
at com.metainf.jira.plugin.emailissue.handler.EmailThisIssueMailHandler.handleMessage(EmailThisIssueMailHandler.java:179)

The problem occurs because some of the user accounts do not have a corresponding user key. However user key is mandatory in JIRA.

Solution

JIRA Caches user keys to user names. To find  defect user accounts execute this SQL query:

SELECT
    lower_user_name
FROM
    cwd_user
WHERE
    lower_user_name NOT IN (
        SELECT lower_user_name FROM app_user
);


If the query returns a result, that means those users were not created/migrated correctly and do not have an entry in app_user.

Before running the query, read through a related KB article: https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/jira-login-fails-with-user-exists-but-has-no-unique-key-mapping-373261121.html