Problem

When accessing the Application Links page by going to Jira Administration ⚙ >  Applications > Application links, you see the following error:

Something went wrong

The server returned a bad response.

You can try to refresh the page. If the error persists the application logs might provide additional information or you can reach out to your admin.

The error looks something like the below:

When you close the message, none of your application links appear at all and you cannot make any changes to them.

The issue described in this article will display an error in the "atlassian-jira.log" file(s) similar to the below:

2022-05-05 15:00:40,786+1000 https-jsse-nio-49222-exec-25 ERROR admin 900x68x2 q4zvxm 0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1 /rest/applinks/3.0/applinks [c.a.p.r.c.error.jersey.ThrowableExceptionMapper] Uncaught exception thrown by REST service: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Schema specific part is opaque
com.google.common.util.concurrent.UncheckedExecutionException: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Schema specific part is opaque
	at com.google.common.cache.LocalCache$Segment.get(LocalCache.java:2050)
	at com.google.common.cache.LocalCache.get(LocalCache.java:3952)
	at com.google.common.cache.LocalCache.getOrLoad(LocalCache.java:3974)
	at com.google.common.cache.LocalCache$LocalLoadingCache.get(LocalCache.java:4958)
	at com.google.common.cache.LocalCache$LocalLoadingCache.getUnchecked(LocalCache.java:4964)
	at com.atlassian.applinks.core.manifest.AppLinksManifestDownloader.downloadInternal(AppLinksManifestDownloader.java:108)
	at com.atlassian.applinks.core.manifest.AppLinksManifestDownloader.downloadNoEvent(AppLinksManifestDownloader.java:102)
	at com.atlassian.applinks.internal.capabilities.DefaultRemoteCapabilitiesService.updateAndGet(DefaultRemoteCapabilitiesService.java:290)
	at com.atlassian.applinks.internal.capabilities.DefaultRemoteCapabilitiesService.getCapabilitiesUnrestricted(DefaultRemoteCapabilitiesService.java:255)
<snip>

Of note here is "Schema specific part is opaque".

Diagnosis

Environment

This issue appears to be present in versions of Jira from 8.0 to 8.22.2 at the time of writing. See the bug ticket linked below for more up-to-date details on versioning.

Diagnostic Steps

To see if your Jira is experiencing this issue, run the below SQL command against your Jira database:

SELECT
    propertyentry.id   AS id,
    property_key       AS key,
    propertyvalue      AS value
FROM
    propertystring
INNER JOIN
    propertyentry
ON
    propertyentry.id = propertystring.id
WHERE
    property_key LIKE 'applinks%rpc.url';

In the results, if you see any URL's which are malformed where the "http://" is missing the "//" part or the "//" is accidentally elsewhere in the URL, you are impacted by this issue.

Cause

This problem is caused by an existing and working Application Link being updated with a malformed Application URL. Unfortunately Jira does not correctly double-check updated Application URLs.

For example, an existing Application Link is set to "http://localhost:8080/" and works fine. But is then accidentally updated to "http:localhost:8080/" where the "//" is missing from the URL, or, http:l//ocalhost:8080/" where the "//" is placed incorrectly in the URL this error can occur.

Workaround

To correct this, we need to make changes to the database as the Jira UI will not allow us to use the Application Links page to fix the incorrect URL.

Once you have backed up your database, proceed with the following:

• Run the query from the Diagnostic steps to identify the incorrect URL. Then copy it to your clipboard

• Run the below query against your Jira database:

  UPDATE propertystring
  SET propertyvalue = '<correct_URL_of_the_app>'
  WHERE propertyvalue = '<incorrect_URL_from_previous_query>';

• Restart Jira

Once Jira is restarted your Application Links page should appear as normal and you can update the Application Link as normal.

Resolution

A resolution to this issue is currently being tracked as a part of  JRASERVER-73775 - Getting issue details... STATUS  and will be updated on that page once complete. This page is created for historical reasons for anyone still running impacted versions.