”Issue Type for issue with id ‘…’ is null” when searching issues in JIRA is no longer a problem with Bobcares by your side. 

At Bobcares, we offer solutions for every query, big and small, as a part of our Server Management Service.

Let’s take a look at how our Support Team recently helped a customer with ”Issue Type for issue with id ‘…’ is null” when searching issues in JIRA.

“Issue Type for issue with id ‘…’ is null” when searching issues in JIRA

Sometimes we may come across a large block of error that starts with the following sentences while looking for issues in JIRA:

The message is "An error occurred whilst rendering this message. Please contact the administrators, and inform them of this bug. Details: ------- org.apache.velocity.exception.MethodInvocationException: Invocation of method 'getHtml' in class com.atlassian.jira.issue.fields.layout.column.ColumnLayoutItemImpl threw exception java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Issue Type for issue with id '...' is null."

According to our Support Engineers, this is more likely to occur in Jira Service Service Management 4.5 and Jira 8.5. Moreover, it is also likely to occur in Jira versions 7 and 8 as well.

In this scenario, we will usually see the following error messages in the atlassian-jira.log:

2020-05-07 07:54:00,037 http-nio-127.0.0.1-8080-exec-61 ERROR  473x2230574x1 e0lj6e ,127.0.0.1 /issues/ [c.atlassian.velocity.DefaultVelocityManager] MethodInvocationException occurred getting message body from Velocity: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Issue Type for issue with id '...' is null.

The ‘…’ indicates any number that represents the internal ID of an issue on the jiraissue database table.

The root cause behind the error is usually due to issues not having an associated issue type. Furthermore, it may also occur due to interrupted operations like bulk editions, data import, moving issues, or direct interference on the database.

How to resolve “Issue Type for issue with id ‘…’ is null” when searching issues in JIRA

1. First, we have to conduct a broad search on the database to highlight the reasons that may be causing the error:

   select i.id, p.pkey, i.issuenum, i.issuetype 
   from jiraissue i j
   oin project p on p.id = i.project 
   where i.issuetype is null or i.issuetype in ('', ' ');

    

2. Then, for each different project key or pkey we get, we will select an issue type ID from the output we get by running:

   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. Next, we have to update each issue with the issue type id:

   For instance, to update issues separately:

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

   For instance, to update all corrupted issues at once:

   update jiraissue set summary = 'abcdefghijk', issuetype = <issue-type-id> where issuetype is null or i.issuetype in ('', ' ');
4. After that, we will restart Jira and once it is online, we have to search for the issues we modified and bulk edit them as required.

   We can use JQL to search for these issues as seen below:

   summary ~ 'abcdefghijk'

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Conclusion

To conclude, the skilled Support Engineers at Bobcares demonstrated what to do when we come across “Issue Type for issue with id ‘…’ is null” when searching issues in Jira