NullPointerException When Trying to Access JIRA Agile Classic Boards
Platform Notice: Data Center Only - This article only applies to Atlassian products on the Data Center platform.
Note that this KB was created for the Data Center version of the product. Data Center KBs for non-Data-Center-specific features may also work for Server versions of the product, however they have not been tested. Support for Server* products ended on February 15th 2024. If you are running a Server product, you can visit the Atlassian Server end of support announcement to review your migration options.
*Except Fisheye and Crucible
Summary
Symptoms
A JIRA Agile (Greenhopper) user may encounter an error screen similar to what is shown below when trying to access Classic Boards from the agile menu. This occurs when certain projects are selected.
Also, it appears the occurrences of this problem are usually after an upgrade.
Also, the JIRA logs contain the following:
1
2
3
4
5
/secure/VersionBoard.jspa [com.atlassian.velocity.DefaultVelocityManager]
MethodInvocationException occurred getting message body from Velocity: java.lang.NullPointerException
java.lang.NullPointerException
at com.pyxis.greenhopper.jira.configurations.UserBoardsPreferences.loadFromDatabase(UserBoardsPreferences.java:349)
at com.pyxis.greenhopper.jira.configurations.UserBoardsPreferences.<init>(UserBoardsPreferences.java:66) ...Diagnosis
You may try to review the affected projects through JIRA Administration menu > Projects, you should find that the project lead is set to anonymous or a user that no longer exists in JIRA.
Deleting content of Tomcat work directory, clearing Index and Plugin Caches, and re-indexing JIRA doesn't resolve the problem
Running the Integrity Checker may not show any errors to fix, or show errors that doesn't help resolve the problem when fixed.
Cause
This is usually caused by an invalid Project Lead (perhaps a user that no longer exists in JIRA) being associated with a project used in the classic boards.
Solution
Resolution
You may be able to simply set a new valid project lead for this project from the JIRA UI and this should fix the problem.
In certain cases, attempting to set the project lead via the JIRA interface will also result in an error. In this case you may need to do this from the database. Please take the following steps:
1
update project set lead='username' where pname='project name';
Was this helpful?