Issue Summary

"Refresh All Application Links" button in Applications Navigator clears (removes) remote links from UI instead of refreshing them

Environment

JIRA 7.13, JIRA 8.x with application links to multiple remote applications

Steps to Reproduce

Example scenario:All applications should remain on the page

1. Deploy JIRA 7.13 or 8.x
2. Deploy Confluence 6.10.1, Bitbucket 5.11, Bamboo 6.7.2 (I believe other versions will do, but I only tried these and customer is using Confluence 6.10.1)
3. In JIRA create Application links to the applications
4. Navigate to JIRA -> Settings -> Applications -> Application Navigator. Notice that all applications are there on the page
5. Hit the 'refresh all application links' button (on the right).

Expected Results: All applications should remain on the page
Actual Results: Some applications will get removed (in my case only JIRA stayed)

Cause:

List of remote/external applications is stored in the cache which is cleared (not refresh) by the button. After that site make next request: "/rest/custom-apps/1.0/customapps/list?=<id>". This method returns local app links and remote one which is stored in cache. This cache is refreshed every 10 seconds by default – so if you refresh (cmd+R or F5) this site 10 seconds after you clicked refresh button list should be complete. The problem is with UI. UI should indicate that it still wait for cache invalidation and after that reload list of app links. The interval of cache refreshing is 10 seconds by default and can be set by system property “navlink.navigationlinkscache.delay” but remember if you decrease(<10s) value of this delay you can make Jira slower or starve other threads in environment.

Workaround

a) Wait 10 seconds and perform refresh of the whole page (i.e. F5 or cmd+R)

b)* You can specify the system property with “-D<property>=<value>” JVM flag e.g. “-D navlink.navigationlinkscache.delay=10” (there is no whitespaces)

1. Please go to setenv.sh script and add your option to “JVM_SUPPORT_RECOMMENDED_ARGS” https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/setting-properties-and-options-on-startup-938847831.html
2. Restart Jira instance

Please be mindful, workaround b can make Jira slower or starve other threads in environment (i.e. depending on the instance usage it may cause performance impact)