Many issues due to no title for a page in confluence database.

[Nawaz Quadri]

I received few issues from many users about some of the behavior of our upgraded confluence 4.2.1. The issues reported by them are as follows.

•Not able to set home page for a space

•Tree view of the pages not working for many spaces

•Page Index macro showing Null pointer exception

*Root Cause*

Exploring all these issue I conclude only one reason for all these issues. There are many entries in the confluence database for the pages with no title. Although Confluence does not allow creation of pages without a title but somehow these entries exist.

*Reason for creation of pages without title*

To explore this, I tried many things and was able to reproduce this scenario. It looks like, there is a bug in confluence in creating/editing a page template. If we are creating a page template and if there is an issue in using a macro (it can be incorrect parameters or anything that prohibits the macro used in the template to render it correctly), and if we save it without correcting the issue, there will be a page created in the confluence database without a title. The same is true when we are editing a template containing macro issues. Please note that templates in confluence still use wiki markup style and not a rich text style. The pages without the title can be listed in ‘orphaned pages’ section.

*Workaround Solution*

If we change title of these pages containing no title to some title (example – ‘Blank Title’) through following database query directly in the database, and flush the cache of the confluence, all these issue will be resolved without restarting the confluence instance.

{code}

update CONTENT set TITLE = 'Blank title' where TITLE is null AND CONTENTTYPE = 'PAGE';

{code}

Please confirm it as a bug and provide a fix in the future releases

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

If it's a bug, you need to raise it in Atlassian's bug tracker at jira.atlassian.com - here, at Answers, is a user community. Atlassian lurk here and often post, but bugs need to go directly to them.

From memory (and in Confluence 3.4) there are some pages which legitimately have no titles, so a blanket "fix" for all the untitled pages might not be the correct answer. Also, in my test Confluence 4.2, I don't see this behaviour, so you probably need to do some more diagnosis with Atlassian. Before raising a bug, it may be better to raise a proper support issue with them for your installation.