Unable to Connect Bitbucket/Confluence to Jira User Directory

Question

I have previously used Crowd to maintain my user directories for Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket, but it seems overkill for what I need, so am planning to revert to using Jira as the User Directory Server.

I have set up my Jira User Server and added Confluence and Bitbucket as Applications with permitted IP addresses.

When attempting to add the Jira User Directory to either Confluence or Bitbucket, I get the following error:

javax.xml.bind.UnmarshalException - with linked exception: [org.xml.sax.SAXParseException; lineNumber: 78; columnNumber: 26; The entity name must immediately follow the '&' in the entity reference.]

The configuration is as follows (URL anonymised). The Application Password contains only alphanumerics (no special characters).

Trying a direct URL call to

https://jira.domain.uk/jira/rest/usermanagement/1/search?entity-type=user&start-index=0&max-results=1&expand=user

gives me an authentication  dialog box in the browser.

unknown · Answer

The atlassian-jira.log raises an error at Trace level:

2020-07-23 12:42:58,716+0000 ForkJoinPool.commonPool-worker-0 WARN xxxxxx 762x3810x1 ueqxfd 192.168.x.x,192.168.x.x /secure/admin/ConfigureCrowdServer.jspa [c.a.j.cache.request.RequestCacheImpl] Incorrect usage of JIRA API. You can only create/use: RequestCacheImpl inside a context (request or Jira-Thread-Local). Check: JiraThreadLocalUtil for details.
2020-07-23 12:42:58,716+0000 ForkJoinPool.commonPool-worker-0 WARN xxxxxx 762x3810x1 ueqxfd 192.168.x.x,192.168.x.x /secure/admin/ConfigureCrowdServer.jspa [c.a.j.cache.request.RequestCacheImpl] From Jira 9.0 version creation/usage of RequestCacheImpl will throw the IllegalStateException.

unknown · Answer

Thanks @Petter Gonçalves

I have followed the instructions and checked CWD_USER for the "&" and any invalid characters held in brackets or unicode characters.

However, there aren't any such values, so this may not be the problem.

Petter Gonçalves · Answer

Hello @[deleted]

Thank you for reaching out.

Per your description, I believe you might be facing a variation of the problem described in the article below:

JIRA Directory synchronization fails due to invalid XML character

That being said, please check in the CWD_USER table of your Jira database if there are any columns with special characters, properly updating it as suggested in the article:

* Save the output of the query below in a TXT file:SELECT * FROM CWD_USER;

* Search for the invalid characters manually ("&")

Let us know if you have any other questions.