Error "Issue Type for issue with id '...' is null" when searching issues in Jira

Summary

Problem

When searching for issues in Jira, a big block of errors might be shown on the screen, starting with:

Environment

Confirmed in Jira 8.5 and Jira Service Management 4.5.

Likely to happen on several Jira 7 and 8 versions as well.

Diagnosis

The error on the screen will start with:

And in the atlassian-jira.log we should see:

Which '...' can be any number that represents an issue's internal id on the jiraissue database table.

Cause

This error is caused due to issues not having an associated issue type, just like the error messages suggest.

This is an exception to Jira's behavior and might have happened during interrupted operations like moving issues, bulk editions, data import or direct interference on the database.

Solution

The solution is to identify the corrupted issues, fix them on the database and further delete them if needed.

ℹ️ The queries below are for the PostgreSQL database. You may need to alter them for your own database type.

1. The number of affected issues might be higher than what was triggered by the issue search, so we perform a broader search on the database:

   1 2 3 4 select i.id, p.pkey, i.issuenum, i.issuetype from jiraissue i join project p on p.id = i.project where i.issuetype is null or i.issuetype in ('', ' ');

2. For each different project key (pkey) that was returned above, select an issue type id available from the output of the query below:

   1 2 3 4 5 6 7 select p.pkey, it.id, it.pname from project p join configurationcontext cc on p.id = cc.project join fieldconfigschemeissuetype fci on fci.fieldconfigscheme = cc.fieldconfigscheme join optionconfiguration oc on oc.fieldconfig = fci.fieldconfiguration join issuetype it on it.id = oc.optionid where p.pkey = 'PROJECT-KEY'; -- <<< Replace PROJECT-KEY

3. Update the issues with the desired issue type id:

   To update issues separately

   1 update jiraissue set summary = 'abcdefghijk', issuetype = <issue-type-id> where id in (<list of issue ids separated by comma>);

   To update all corrupted issues

   1 update jiraissue set summary = 'abcdefghijk', issuetype = <issue-type-id> where issuetype is null or i.issuetype in ('', ' ');

4. Restart Jira

5. After Jira's back online, we may search for those corrected issues and bulk edit them as we want — even bulk delete them if that's the intention.

   JQL to search for the issues

   1 summary ~ 'abcdefghijk'