Environment

• Crowd 2.12.0+ with external directory
• Oracle DB
• Connected application such as Confluence or BitBucket

Issue

When users from an external directory who have an empty mandatory field (such as email), log in to a connected application, Crowd will add a new entry to the Audit Log showing the email address was updated. However, no update occurs. The update shows as changing " " to " ".

Cause

Oracle DBs treat empty strings as nulls, but LDAP treats them as empty string. So, when comparing the information received from the external directory to what is in the Crowd DB, there is a mismatch between the empty string and null, so Crowd attempts to "update" the field, and adds an entry to the audit log showing it did so.