Summary

Jira allows you to use labels with only a white space in it (go to an issue, click on labels, insert a whitespace, create a new label). It also allows you with to search for labels as the following:

labels = ' '

(white space between single quotes)

However, if you do perform this search you'll see the following results:

1 - JQL responds with "no results" , and the only error you'll see is QueryComponent!jql.jspa failing with an error 500 in the JS Console:

2 - If you save a filter with the above statement it will always throw Null Pointer Exception (error 500)

Why is this important

Avoid the silent error and have consistency in the behavior. If having labels as whitespaces does error things out, this should be handled with validation to not allow the usage of that, instead of allowing the usage and breaking filters.

Proposed Solution

Validate label creations and JQL searching to not allow the inclusion of the white spaces