JIRA Directory synchronisation fails due to invalid XML character


Platform notice: Server and Data Center only. This article only applies to Atlassian products on the Server and Data Center platforms.

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

Issue

Your Bitbucket Server is configured to use JIRA as a User Directory but suddenly stopped working. In the logs you can find an error like that:

ERROR log
ERROR [Caesium-1-4]  c.a.c.d.DbCachingDirectoryPoller Error occurred while refreshing the cache for directory [ 123456 ].
com.atlassian.crowd.exception.OperationFailedException: javax.xml.bind.UnmarshalException
 - with linked exception:
[org.xml.sax.SAXParseException; lineNumber: 1; columnNumber: 1432; An invalid XML character (Unicode: 0x1a) was found in the value of attribute "name" and element is "user".]


Solution

There are two ways of determining which name causes the issue:

Option 1:

  1. Query the cwd_user table for any data containing character put in brackets. In our example, it's (Unicode: 0x1a).

The query depends on the database type, as the Unicode character might be represented differently in different databases. 

If you wish to follow this path, please build a SELECT statement querying the JIRA CWD_USER table for the Unicode character mentioned in the log.

Option 2:

Save the output of:

SELECT * FROM CWD_USER;

to cwd_user.txt file

and search for the invalid characters manually:

grep --color='auto' --line-number --perl-regexp "[^\x00-\x7F]" cwd_user.txt

Once you find the faulty credentials, please correct them in JIRA (manually removing it and adding again should be enough), and start the synchronization again.



DescriptionJIRA Directory synchronisation fails due to invalid XML character
ProductBitbucket Server



Last modified on Jul 2, 2019

Was this helpful?

Yes
No
Provide feedback about this article
Powered by Confluence and Scroll Viewport.