Loading the backlog view of an Agile board fails with "Exception: Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'localeCompare' of undefined"
Platform notice: Server and Data Center only. This article only applies to Atlassian products on the Server and Data Center platforms.
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
Problem
The backlog view of an Agile board does not load and throws a JavaScript error in the UI:
An error occurred
Exception: Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'localeCompare' of undefined
No errors appear in the server logs.
Diagnosis
The issue may be intermittent and will depend on which issues are included in the backlog view. You should use the quick filters to isolate the suspect.
The idea here is to activate quick filters to show only a subset of the issues in the board, see if the problem reproduces, and narrow the scope down until you find the problematic issue(s).
Cause
Although we're unable to consistently reproduce the problem, we discovered that having an issue in the view assigned to a user with no display name (NULL) in Jira may trigger it.
Workaround
Make sure all your users have display names in Jira. A display name is generally a combination of first name and last name.
Resolution
As mentioned, we're unable to consistently reproduce the problem so we cannot create a bug for it.
Ideally, all users in Jira should have proper display names anyways so this can also be considered a solution.