[Bug?] Custom Fields randomly set to null on issue update/reassign/transition

[Kevin Tracy]

Hi, we're having an issue where users are updating, assigning, or transitioning tickets, and when it reindexes or saves or whatnot, it suddenly sets some of our customfields to null. This happens randomly on probably about 1/100 of our issues and we have NO idea why it is.

Here's a screenshot of a changegroup in our database where this happened. The bottom row is the field that the agent wanted to update. The top two rows just got dragged along with it for some reason, and mysteriously got set to null.

Selection_063.png

Another interesting thing is that this seems to happen on the same handful of customfields, several of which are related to our company's revenue--so you see why this is problematic.

My best guess is that this is some kind of bug related to indexing. Just wanted to check if anyone had any ideas or experienced something similar.

Thanks,

Kevin

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

It's not the indexing - that only reads the database, doesn't write.  It's something in the change process.

I would start with a proper look at the history - what does that say (changeitem is only part of the history, I'd like to see all of the entry for the change)

[Kevin Tracy]

Do you mean the "history" tab on the issue or is there a better place to look? Because our history tab only shows certain key updates like status and assignee, so it's not useful here. I'm not sure if we set this preference somewhere or if that's how it works by default.

[MattS]

If changes to a custom field are not being shown in the Issue History I would suspect that there is some custom code involved with those custom fields. Perhaps a listener that looks for changes to a field and updates other fields?

[Kevin Tracy]

We have some script listeners but none that touch those fields. Also we do not have any javascript or anything like that at the moment that might be interfering during changes

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

You definitely have some custom code somewhere - the history tab should show all updates on all fields on the issue.

In fact, I'd start to suspect that whatever is hiding (or possibly damaging?) your history is quite possibly the cause of the problem.

[Joe Pitt]

I've heard the 'yes we have code, but it doesn't touch that' many times in the past on multiple applications and it almost always comes back that the code did cause the problem but either the current staff didn't know the extent of the code or there was a bug and you just met the condition that triggered it. I had something running in production for about 18 months before the situation came up that uncovered the bug.

[Joe Pitt]

You should open an issue with Atlassian