Symptoms

Sometimes an error might appear in Jira on the Issue Navigator or while setting Due Date or during other operations.

The following appears in the atlassian-jira.log:

Input must be in the format 'YYYYMMDD'.
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Input must be in the format 'YYYYMMDD'.
	at com.atlassian.jira.datetime.LocalDateFactory.fromIsoBasicFormat(LocalDateFactory.java:80)
	at com.atlassian.jira.util.LuceneUtils.stringToLocalDate(LuceneUtils.java:168)
	at com.atlassian.jira.issue.statistics.LocalDateFieldSorter.getValueFromLuceneField(LocalDateFieldSorter.java:31)

Cause

This error is generally caused when the date formats set for JIRA conflict the date formats set for Java.

Resolution

• Configure the date formats under Advanced Settings of General Configuration in Jira based on the instructions on this page : Configuring JIRA Options
• Check the date formats under Look and Feel and see if it's correct.
• If date formats of both pages are correct, try to do the following step to clear the cache and rebuild it:
  
  1. Shutdown your JIRA
  2. Remove the following directories as they will rebuild when you restart JIRA
     
     • jira-home-path/caches/indexes
  3. Restart JIRA
  4. Reindex Jira