Symptoms

When using Jira for user management, users synch with Confluence but groups do not.

The following appears in the atlassian-confluence.log:

2012-04-12 17:09:36,847 ERROR [scheduler_Worker-1] [atlassian.crowd.directory.DbCachingDirectoryPoller] pollChanges Error occurred while refreshing the cache for directory [ 851969 ].
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: group.name argument cannot be null or blank

Diagnosis

Run the following SQL against the JIRA database, if any results are returned then you are experiencing this issue.

• Prior to JIRA 4.3 

  SELECT * FROM GROUPBASE WHERE ((ID is null) OR (groupname is null));

• JIRA 4.3 and above 

  SELECT * FROM cwd_group WHERE ((ID is null) OR (group_name is null) OR (lower_group_name is null) OR (group_name = '') OR (lower_group_name = ''));
  

Cause

There is a null entry in the JIRA GROUPBASE.

Resolution

Run the follow SQL command to remove the NULL entries from the GROUPBASE table.

Prior to JIRA 4.3

DELETE FROM GROUPBASE WHERE ((ID is null) OR (groupname is null));

JIRA 4.3 and above

DELETE FROM cwd_group WHERE ((ID is null) OR (group_name is null) OR (lower_group_name is null) OR (group_name = '') OR (lower_group_name = ''));