Why does importing fail with "Illegal group reference" error?

Question

We're trying to upgrade our Jira (6.0.1) to the latest version (6.2.2) and we keep getting the error "No group named {version}". After some troubleshooting, it seems that the exported xml file (entities.xml) contain free text fields (like issue descriptions) containing the character '$' that are interpreted by the importer as "group references".

This seems to be a known (?) bug that is supposed to have been fixed in an earlier version of Jira, so I think that we have missed something in the exporting process.

We're using MySQL 5.6.10 as database backend.

Martin Uddén · Answer

The problem was twofold.

1. Some user names contained '$' characters. These users had to be removed. It didn't work to just remove the '$' signs as this resulted in duplicate users (we're using a very large AD directory)

2. Other text data (summaries, descriptions, comments etc.) also contained '$' characters that had to be removed before importing was successful.

Benito Picarelli · Answer

Hello Martin,

We have a documentation page regarding this problem:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRAKB/JIRA+Upgrade+Fails+with+'NullPointerException'+Due+to+Missing+Name+Field

Could you take a look at the resolution suggested?

Benito Picarelli