Issue not accessible due to too many links in Jira Data Center

Summary

When an issue has too many links, it can become very slow to load or even unavailable in the UI as detailed in Jira Software guardrails

The goal of this article is to provide ways to delete issue links.

Environment

Jira Data Center

Solution

Here are the methods of deleting issue links.

1 - User interface

When the UI is accessible, you can delete the links using the user interface:

2 - REST API

Using the REST API, we can send a DELETE request to the /rest/api/2/issuelink/{linkid} endpoint. More details about the endpoint at https://docs.atlassian.com/software/jira/docs/api/REST/9.17.0/#api/2/issueLink-deleteIssueLink

Here's an example of how to bulk delete the issue links using the REST API for the issue "ISSUE-123".

1. Run this curl below to fetch the issue links:

   1 curl -s -u admin:mypassword https://myjira.com/rest/api/2/issue/ISSUE-123 | jq '.fields.issuelinks[]|.self,.type.name,.outwardIssue.key,.inwardIssue.key' | grep -v null | sed 's/"//g' > issuelinks.txt

2. Verify the issuelinks.txt file and double-check that you wish to delete all issue links present in it. Remove issue links that should be preserved.

3. To delete the issue links from the file, run this command below.

   ⚠️ Once the issue links are deleted, there is no way to restore them.

   1 for i in $(egrep "(http)|(https)://.*issueLink" issuelinks.txt); do echo deleting $i; curl -u admin:mypassword -X DELETE $i; done

3 - Database

⚠️ We don't recommend performing the changes in the database directly, and this should be used as a last resort. Always back up your database before deleting data.

Deleting the links from the database have the drawbacks of increased risk and it causes the indexes to be outdated. Because each links is present in both issues in the index, all the related issues need to be reindexed, demanding a project or even full reindex to make sure the link-related searches are accurate.

In this example, we're deleting the links related to the issue "ISSUE-123"

1. First, let's fetch all the issue links, to view the data we're about to delete. Notice we've specified the desired issue in the WHERE statement.

   1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 SELECT il.id as LinkID,ilt.linkname,CONCAT(p2.pkey,'-',i2.issuenum) AS Source,CONCAT(p3.pkey,'-',i3.issuenum) AS Destination FROM jiraissue i JOIN project p on i.project=p.id JOIN issuelink il ON (i.id=il.destination OR i.id=il.source) JOIN issuelinktype ilt ON ilt.id=il.linktype JOIN jiraissue i2 ON i2.id=il.source JOIN project p2 on i2.project=p2.id JOIN jiraissue i3 ON i3.id=il.destination JOIN project p3 on i3.project=p3.id WHERE p.pkey='ISSUE' AND i.issuenum=123

2. Take note of the projects the related issues are related. Also take notes of issue links that you wish to be preserved, if any.

3. Now, let's delete the issues. In this example, we're deleting all links except for 10721 and 10722

   1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 DELETE FROM issuelink WHERE id IN ( SELECT il.id FROM jiraissue i JOIN project p on i.project=p.id JOIN issuelink il ON (i.id=il.destination OR i.id=il.source) WHERE p.pkey='ISSUE' AND i.issuenum=123) AND id NOT IN (10721,10722)

4. Reindex all issues related to the links. You can re-index the related projects or run a full re-index.