How to delete or map correctly a user with no user name

[Lee Eden]

We have a user in our system that the system claims doesn't exists.

We want to delete the user has it causes us errors, but we can't delete it though the admin because it doesn't recognize it as an existing user.

What can be done?

[Lee Eden · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the help, we think the user was created by mistake somehow, it never logged in and had no activity at all, so we felt safe to remove it.

at the end we created an identical user in our active directory and synced it, which created the full name the user was missing, than we deactivated it and now all is well and the error we got are gone.

it actually solved additional errors we had in our system, probably been making problems for a few years now that we couldn’t figure out before :)

i hope ole this will help someone else in the future 

[Andy Heinzer · Accepted solution]

We typically recommend against deleting users from Jira.  The reasons are explained in more detail in https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/create-edit-or-remove-a-user-938847025.html

But basically it tends to cause data integrity problems if you delete users that have historical events in Jira (comments, reporters, assignees, etc).   Many times users will connect Jira to an LDAP or Active Directory to get users into Jira.  As time passes, sometimes those users can get removed from that external directory entirely.  When this happens, Jira can still create an empty record for users like this.  These accounts can't be activated or login, but these act as placeholders so that Jira can tell who did what actions.

From that document cited above:

Before you delete, note that:

• You cannot delete a user from within Jira if you are using External User Management (However, you can deactivate the user. See instructions above).
• You cannot delete a user from Jira if they have:
  • reported or been assigned to any issues.
  • commented on any issues.
• The filters and dashboards of a user will be deleted when the user is deleted, even if the filters or dashboards are shared with other users.
• All issues that have been reported by or assigned to the user you are attempting to delete, are respectively hyperlinked to a list of the individual issues in the Issue Navigator.

Perhaps we can get a better understanding of your specific data if you can run the following SQL queries against your database:

select * from cwd_user where lower_user_name='jsmith';

and

select * from app_user where userkey='jsmith';

where jsmith the username for this account.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Where can you see this non-existent user?

[Lee Eden]

In the user management screen, I see it’s I’d, the groups they are in but there is no “full name” and if I try, for example to take it out of a group I get an error that the user doesn’t exist :-/

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Hmm, what do you see when you go to https://yourjira/secure/ViewProfile.jspa?name=<username> ?

[Lee Eden]

I get "The specified user could not be found."