Project import fails with "There are required user(s) that JIRA can not automatically create."
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
During a project import a validation message shows up indicating a mandatory user could not be created, however, clicking the View Details options renders a blank result set.
The following appears in the atlassian-jira.log
2016-12-08 15:32:53,264 JiraTaskExectionThread-2 ERROR sysadmin 932x440x1 1gibui1 172.20.44.29 /secure/admin/ProjectImportSelectProject.jspa [c.a.j.imports.project.DefaultProjectImportService] There are '1' required user(s) that JIRA can not automatically create.
Cause
The source data has issues assigned to a blank/null user for any of the mandatory users due to unknown cause.
Workaround
- Copy your backup file and keep it in a safe place in case of you need the previous data in the future;
- Unzip the file and edit the entities.xml file. We need to check blank/null values for all the mandatory users.
- Mandatory users are:
- Assignee
- lead
- reporter
- creator
- To remove all occurrences of mandatory users which are blank here is the command incase you are using an Unix-based operating system. You can run the below command on a terminal window.
$ sed -i 's/assignee=""//g' entities.xml
$ sed -i 's/lead=""//g' entities.xml
$ sed -i 's/reporter=""//g' entities.xml
$ sed -i 's/creator=""//g' entities.xml
Also you can make sure the entities.xml does not have blank or null for the mandatory users using below mentioned commands
$ grep -c 'lead=""' entities.xml
$ grep -c 'assignee=""' entities.xml
$ grep -c 'reporter=""' entities.xml
$ grep -c 'creator=""' entities.xml
- Zip the backup back together and rerun the project import with the fixed backup.
zip fixed_backup.zip entities.xml activeobjects.xml