Orphaned plugin-related custom fields in the database - how to remove them?

[Błażej O_]

While looking for unused custom fields in the database I have found some really old customfields:

Test Sessions	10008	com.atlassian.bonfire.plugin:bonfire-multi-session-cft
Testing Status	10017	com.atlassian.bonfire.plugin:bonfire-testing-status-cft
Bonfire Browser	10011	com.atlassian.bonfire.plugin:bonfire-text
Bonfire Operating System	10012	com.atlassian.bonfire.plugin:bonfire-text
Bonfire User Agent	10010	com.atlassian.bonfire.plugin:bonfire-text
issueFunction	10402	com.onresolve.jira.groovy.groovyrunner:jqlFunctionsCustomFieldType
Bonfire jQuery Version	10015	com.atlassian.bonfire.plugin:bonfire-text
Bonfire URL	10013	com.atlassian.bonfire.plugin:bonfire-text
Bonfire Screen Resolution	10014	com.atlassian.bonfire.plugin:bonfire-text
uuid	10018	com.atlassian.jconnect.jconnect-plugin:uuid

Those fields are not displayed on custom field list in Jira. When I try referencing the field by the ID jira shows:

There are no customfieldvalue entries for these fields in the database.

Plugins/Apps that probably introduced those fields (Bonfire, Script Runner, jconnect) are long gone from our instance. I suppose old versions of these plugins were unable to properly clean after themselves while uninstalling, and those old fields were carried over with all our subsequent jira upgrades.

Integrity Checker shows that everything is fine - obviously it can't detect those fields.

How can I clean those orhpaned unused customfields without breaking anything? Is there any tool for this? Or maybe some KB article on this?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

It is safer to simply ignore them, although if you put scriptrunner back, you could write a script to safely remove most of them.

Why are you worried about getting rid of them?

[Błażej O_]

Well, we do ignore those so far, but they pop-up from time to time in different scenarios and force us to keep track of them as an exception to the rule. Few cases are:

• cPrime health Report mention those as unused fields
• DB based Jira integrations show those fields in various reports
  
  

So far it's only annoyance and unnecessary maintenance cost but I generaly like to tie all loose ends to avoid the butterfly effect in the future, and these bugged entries definitely count as loose ends.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yep, the cPrime Health Report is not coded to ignore them (I'd argue rightly so, as it's worth noting they are there).

As for DB Based Jira integrations, you probably shouldn't be doing that.  Reporting directly off a Jira database is a terrible thing to do.  One of the minor reasons is that it doesn't understand the logic for fields like these, so they don't know to ignore them.