500 error when trying to access Service Desk

Question

We recently newly installed (not upgraded) Service Desk version 3.6.1 onto our JIRA instance running software version 7.4.1. I've created two sample Service Desk projects and I get 500 errors on both when I try to access the project landing pages + any type of administrative page, I can see tickets fine but when I access other pages I get a 500 error with a response along the lines of:

Technical details

Log's referral number: xxxxx

Cause

Referer URL: xxxx

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: cacheLoader returned null for key 'SD_REQTYPE'

_________________________________

I get that when trying to navigate to the main project page at: https://jira.instance.com/projects/ABCD/welcome-guide

and then also when trying to access other admin features at:

https://jira.instance.com/servicedesk/admin/ABCD/portal-settings

https://jira.instance.com/servicedesk/admin/ABCD/confluence-kb

I'm currently set as an Admin for our JIRA instance, and in the jira-servicedesk-user group. Any help on what's going on is greatly appreciated.

unknown · Answer

Thanks for the reply Andrew! For clarification, this issue is with our staging server so that's a plus. I did initiate an install of a previous version of Service Desk not realizing our staging server's Jira Software was ahead a couple versions from our prod server. But since the install didn't finish I thought I'd be in the clear.

I'll proceed by first trying to remove JSD data from the database and will report back with any issues. Thanks again for your help.

Andy Heinzer · Answer

Hi Ray,
I know you stated this was not an upgrade.  However is it possible that your Jira site had an older version of Service Desk installed at some time in the past?   I ask because the specific kind of error you see here has been seen before, but it tends to happen when skipping over some key versions.

If your Jira database has never stored any service desk data, then this won't happen.  But if you had even a service desk trial in the past, say for a Jira 6.4 or earlier version, which would have been a 2.5.x version of Service Desk, this can leave database records that can't get updated correctly unless you first upgrade Service Desk to a 3.0 -> 3.1.x version.  The problem is that you can't install those versions of Service Desk to any version of Jira 7.2.x or higher.

There is a pretty comprehensive KB on this problem I would recommend in After upgrading to JIRA Service Desk 3.2.x or greater, Service Desk project's navigation bar shows "Unable to render element due to an error".   While it does describe some steps you can take to try to downgrade Jira first in order to update this JSD data, that approach is less than desirable for many users.

And if you really don't have a previous Service Desk data that you are concerned about, then there is another approach you can use to get past this problem.  In which case, I would actually recommend taking a look at the customer comments on https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDSERVER-4732

It could be possible for you to follow the steps other users have to correct this by removing all the Jira Service Desk specific AO tables from the database.   If you try this approach, please create a backup of your database first, and stop Jira before making these manual changes to the Jira database.  It might be best to test this kind of major change in a staging server first.