Problems with native characters - urgent, plz help!

[maggot84]

Hi, I'm new to the Alfresco Community and am in desperate need of help 'cause I've come across an issue that I can't seem to work out by myself.
I've searched a large part of this forum, but unfortunately none of the related topics provided me with a solution, so I've submited a new one.
I'm using the polish language (my native) and here's where the problem occurs: all descriptions, options, etc. (the things that, I guess, aren't kept in the databse) are displayed with proper polish native characters, whereas names, titles or descriptions of spaces or content are not (I'm getting '?' instead of polish characters).
I've downloaded the alfresco-community-war-2.1.0 package and deployed it on:
1) Apache Tomcat 5.5, MySQL 5.0.51a database server, Windows Vista Business, Mozilla Firefox browser
2) Apache Tomcat 5.5.26, MySQL 5, Ubuntu 7.10, Mozilla Firefox

In both cases I experienced the same. I've already tried changing encoding in both the browser and the database, none of these worked.
I need to solve this problem as quick as possible and would be extremely grateful for any help.

Oh, and another question: why is it that regardless of the used language, the names of spaces are allways in polish? Does alfresco look up some system settings during the first deployment and use them while creating spaces?

[steve]

Hi,

This would indicate that your MySQL install is using the default characterset of Latin-1.
You need to change MySQL to use UTF-8.

You can change the default for MySQL using the following entries in your my.ini or my.cnf config files:

[mysql]
…
default-character-set=utf8
…
[mysqld]
default-character-set=utf8
…
‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍

You will need to restart MySQL after making these changes, and also you will need to drop and recreate your Alfresco schema (don't forget to also delete your contents of the alf_data dir).

You can also change the settings used by your MySQL connector by modifying the settings in your custom-repository.properties file to:

db.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost/alfresco?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=utf-8
‍‍‍

Steve

[maggot84]

That did the trick!
Thank you very, very, very much!

[steve]

No problem, glad that helped.

Steve