Email subject: "An error occurred whilst rendering this message. Please Please contact the administrators, and inform them of this bug." - what does this mean?

[Phil Cole]

I'm sure this question has been asked previously, but I haven't found where, so if someone has the appropriate link, that'd be great :)

We've started seeing emails being sent by JIRA with the subject "An error occurred whilst rendering this message. Please Please contact the administrators, and inform them of this bug." - what does this really mean and what can I do to resolve?

The body of the message then contains a stack trace:

---- 8< ------

Details:
-------
org.apache.velocity.exception.ParseErrorException:
Encountered &quot;&lt;EOF&gt;&quot; at getEncodedBodyFromContent[line 13,
column 5]
Was expecting one of:
&quot;(&quot; ...
&lt;RPAREN&gt;
...
&lt;ESCAPE_DIRECTIVE&gt; ...
&lt;SET_DIRECTIVE&gt; ...

&quot;##&quot; ...
&quot;\\\\&quot; ...
&quot;\\&quot; ...

&lt;TEXT&gt; ...
&quot;*#&quot; ...
&quot;*#&quot; ...

&lt;STRING_LITERAL&gt; ...
&lt;END&gt; ...

&lt;IF_DIRECTIVE&gt; ...
&lt;STOP_DIRECTIVE&gt; ...

&lt;INTEGER_LITERAL&gt; ...
&lt;FLOATING_POINT_LITERAL&gt; ...

&lt;WORD&gt; ...
&lt;BRACKETED_WORD&gt; ...
&lt;IDENTIFIER&gt;
...
&lt;DOT&gt; ...
&quot;{&quot; ...
&quot;}&quot; ...


at
org.apache.velocity.runtime.RuntimeInstance.evaluate(RuntimeInstance.java:1203)

at
org.apache.velocity.runtime.RuntimeInstance.evaluate(RuntimeInstance.java:1165)

at
org.apache.velocity.app.VelocityEngine.evaluate(VelocityEngine.java:219)

at
com.atlassian.velocity.JiraVelocityManager.getEncodedBodyForContent(JiraVelocityManager.java:81)

at
com.atlassian.jira.template.velocity.DefaultVelocityTemplatingEngine$DefaultRenderRequest.asPlainText(DefaultVelocityTemplatingEngine.java:91)

at
com.atlassian.jira.mail.MailingListCompiler$1.processRecipient(MailingListCompiler.java:305)

at
com.atlassian.jira.mail.NotificationRecipientProcessor.process(NotificationRecipientProcessor.java:39)

at
com.atlassian.jira.mail.MailingListCompiler.addMailsToQueue(MailingListCompiler.java:342)

at
com.atlassian.jira.mail.MailingListCompiler.access$400(MailingListCompiler.java:48)

at
com.atlassian.jira.mail.MailingListCompiler$NotificationCompiler.addEmailsToQueue(MailingListCompiler.java:500)

at
com.atlassian.jira.mail.MailingListCompiler$NotificationCompiler.sendLists(MailingListCompiler.java:470)

at
com.atlassian.jira.mail.MailingListCompiler$NotificationCompiler.sendForEvent(MailingListCompiler.java:428)

at
com.atlassian.jira.mail.MailingListCompiler.sendLists(MailingListCompiler.java:141)

at
com.atlassian.jira.mail.IssueMailQueueItem.send(IssueMailQueueItem.java:159)

at
com.atlassian.mail.queue.MailQueueImpl.sendBuffer(MailQueueImpl.java:66)

at
com.atlassian.jira.service.services.mail.MailQueueService.run(MailQueueService.java:28)

at
com.atlassian.jira.service.JiraServiceContainerImpl.run(JiraServiceContainerImpl.java:61)

at
com.atlassian.jira.service.ServiceRunner.execute(ServiceRunner.java:47)

at org.quartz.core.JobRunShell.run(JobRunShell.java:195)
at
com.atlassian.multitenant.quartz.MultiTenantThreadPool$MultiTenantRunnable.run(MultiTenantThreadPool.java:72)

at
org.quartz.simpl.SimpleThreadPool$WorkerThread.run(SimpleThreadPool.java:520)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Precedence: bulk
Auto-Submitted: auto-generated
X-JIRA-FingerPrint: 02f47d60ecfd810cec06f89bfef02c06

---- >8 ----

and the body of the message that it was trying to send.

I have done some changes to templates today, but these messages started to be sent before the JIRA instance was restarted to pick up the template change.

Anyone know where I should start looking to resolve this issue?

Cheers

Phil

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

You don't always need to restart Jira to pick up template changes - it reads the email templates on demand, and if it hasn't used one for a while, it may have dropped out of the cache, forcing it to re-read the .vm (which you've changed)

I suspect the fact the messages started before you restarted is a bit of a red-herring, and it's actually a consistent problem - you've got a mistake in the .vm you have altered.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I can't make out much of a pattern to be honest - most of the time, you need to restart. But not always. I just work on the assumption that as soon as I change something, what might happen is a grey area until I restart.

[Phil Cole]

Thanks Nic. I'll take another look at the changes I made to the templates. I wasn't aware that a restart wasn't needed to pick up the changes, but I guess it is needed to guarantee that the changes are picked up when you expect them to be.

[Phil Cole]

It turns out that there was an error in a template... the difficult bit was identifying the template with the error.

Remembering that the email is built up of a subject and a body, checking the subject template, I found a missing "#end". With hindsight, unsurprisingly, this was after line 13 of that template file.