Cannot Remove or Edit Properties of an Attachment with Umlaut Characters
Platform Notice: Data Center - This article applies to Atlassian products on the Data Center platform.
Note that this knowledge base article was created for the Data Center version of the product. Data Center knowledge base articles 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
Symptoms
Attachment contains an umlaut or other special character, e.g.
äüö.xlsAttachment deletion fails with "Not Permitted" page even though user has sufficient permission:
Not Permitted You are not permitted to perform this operation.Viewing or editing the properties of the attachment leads to a System Error page with the following stacktrace:
java.lang.NullPointerException at com.atlassian.confluence.pages.actions.MoveAttachmentAction.bootstrap(MoveAttachmentAction.java:112)
Cause
- The application server URL encoding is not set to UTF-8.
The URL encoding attribute is written wrongly or is incorrectly cased, hence Tomcat doesn't understand and pick it up. For example: URIencoding is wrong because it should have an uppercase E, and URlEncoding is wrong because it has a lowercase L instead of an uppercase I. The correct attribute is URIEncoding. It should look like this:
URIEncoding="UTF-8"
Resolution
- Set your application server URL encoding to UTF-8 as described here. For example, in Tomcat add
URIEncoding="UTF-8"to the HTTP connector. - Restart Confluence.
You might need to apply this to all available connectors, too (e.g. AJP connector).