null pointer exception after upload attachment to Confluence with Ä, Ü or Ö in the filename

Question

Version: Confluence 6.2.3

A null pointer exeption occurs every time if I try to upload an attachment with a Character Ä, Ü or Ö in the filename. Everything works fine with filenames without those characters or even with the characters ä, ü or ö.

I also use JIRA and it accepts the upload of filenames with Ä, Ü or Ö without an error.

Thorsten B. · Answer

Hi all,

just ran into the same problem with Confluence 6.2.4

server.xml has the UTF-8 param

When i use the upload form i get a NullPointerException and nothing is uploaded or written to the database.

When i use the the drag and drop form on the page i get a warning with the information "null" but the file is uploaded and i can see it in the attachment list.

But when i try to access/download/delete it i get a "Page Not Found" error.

I can see the file on the filesystem and i can also see the information in the database!

The interesting part is that in the lowertitle column i still have a uppercase char Ö and not ö. If i change now the lowertitel to 123ö.txt inside the database manually everythings works. I can access/download/delete the file on the UI

Andreas Köcher · Answer

Hi Ann,

Thank you for your reply.  The issue looks similar, because it is also about German Umlauts in the filename.

Daniel's reply says, the reason is a Tomcat error and there is nothing you can do in Confluence.

It might be right at that time, but this new problem is different. The aspect URIEncoding="UTF-8"  was always part of our connector directive. The error does not occur with low letter umlauts like ö, ä or ü and it does not occur in JIRA, which also runs on a Tomcat application server.

You can test it in Confluence yourself, upload AuslÖser.txt or Auslöser.txt. The difference between these files is only the big Ö and they contain only some text.

AnnWorley · Answer

Hi Andreas,

A similar issue was reported before, but the lower case letters with umlauts also did not work: Accessing edit/remove attachment URL containing a filename with German Umlauts throws NullPointerException

Please make sure your <confluence_install_dir>/conf/server.xml has this setting inside the connector directive, as recommended in the bug report:

URIEncoding="UTF-8"

Confluence will have to be restarted to pick up the change to the file.

I look forward to hearing whether this works for you.

Thanks,

Ann