Exception When Viewing 'Workflow Schemes' Via Project Administration

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Symptoms

  1. In most cases, the JIRA instances has been recently upgraded to, or past version 4.4.x.
  2. Some fields and transition buttons are missing on the JIRA issues view.
  3. When attempting to access the tab 'Workflow Schemes' via the project administration, the following exception is thrown:

    Error rendering WebPanel (workflows/workflows.vm): org.apache.velocity.exception.MethodInvocationException: Invocation of method 'getHtml' in class com.atlassian.jira.web.component.IssueConstantWebComponent threw exception java.lang.NullPointerException at workflows/workflows.vm[line 119, column 69]

    or

    Error rendering WebPanel (workflows/workflows.vm): org.apache.velocity.exception.MethodInvocationException: Invocation of method 'getHtml' in class com.atlassian.jira.web.component.IssueConstantWebComponent threw exception java.lang.NullPointerException at workflows/workflows.vm[line 136, column 65]

    The below error may displayed in the JIRA GUI:

The following appears in the atlassian-jira.log:

Caused by: org.apache.velocity.exception.MethodInvocationException: Invocation of method 'getHtml' in class com.atlassian.jira.web.component.IssueConstantWebComponent threw exception java.lang.NullPointerException at workflows/workflows.vm[line 119, column 69]
 at org.apache.velocity.runtime.parser.node.ASTMethod.handleInvocationException(ASTMethod.java:337)
 at org.apache.velocity.runtime.parser.node.ASTMethod.execute(ASTMethod.java:284)
 at org.apache.velocity.runtime.parser.node.ASTReference.execute(ASTReference.java:252)
 at org.apache.velocity.runtime.parser.node.ASTReference.render(ASTReference.java:332)
 at org.apache.velocity.runtime.parser.node.ASTBlock.render(ASTBlock.java:72)
 ...
Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException
 at com
.atlassian.jira.web.component.IssueConstantWebComponent.getHtml(IssueConstantWebComponent.java:32)
 at com.atlassian.jira.web.component.IssueConstantWebComponent.getHtml(IssueConstantWebComponent.java:42)
 at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
 at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39)
 at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25)
 at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597)
 ...

Cause

This error occurs because the screen that is being viewed is built by a bundled plugin that calls all workflows details before rendering this screen. If something is missing amongst those calls then a NullPointerException is thrown. In this specific case, the custom workflow statuses don't have valid icons or statuses configured. Hence the screen cannot be generated as well as the entirety of issue details.

Resolution

  1. Go to Administration > Issue Attributes > Statuses and check for any status without a valid icon at its left side.

  2. Click Operations > Edit and specify a valid Icon URL.
  3. Repeat the operation for all broken statuses.
  4. Edit the workflow and check to see if any statuses are missing from step 1. If so, add them back in with a valid icon.
  5. Test by editing the workflow scheme.

(info) If the above steps do not resolve the problem, something else may be missing that is within the workflow. This can be verified by editing it and checking to see if anything else is missing from the JIRA configuration.

In regards to the statement above, you should also ensure that the workflow steps has a respective Linked Status back to itself. As an example, the following workflow has missing Linked Statuses:

Hence, please ensure that the Linked Status are present in the Status:

(info) If you are not able to associate new workflow into the affected project, you can refer into this KB article: Associating Workflow For 'Error rendering WebPanel (workflows/workflows.vm)' Error

Last modified on Mar 30, 2016

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