User data from LDAP: Character encoding problem

[asexto]

First post, so first of all I want to say thanks for this great product.

This actually is happening in my test installation against Active Directory, anyway I suffered the same problem a few days ago using OpenLDAP: User and group data imported from AD (Win2k3 Server, Spanish version) is represented with wrong format in Alfresco's web client.

Problems are all with non-english characters (á, é, ñ…)

I'm not sure where the problem is, but I guess is has something to do with LDAP import tasks: I can create spaces with names containing tildes, so I guess tomcat, linux (gentoo), postgres and alfresco are all working fine.

I googled and searched the forum before posting, hope I'm not repeating a topic.

BTW: I'm using Alfresco 2.1.0 war file. Any clue about what should I do?

Just ask if you need any code.

Thanks

[asexto]

Help would be really appreciated.

[andy]

Hi

Can you post the error.

Andy

[asexto]

I don't have any error message, just strange characters represented instead of the ones I wrote down in Active Directory users details.

Sure you can see exactly the same problem if you create an user in OpenLDAP or AD named for instance "José", "Cuiña", "Adèle", "Toño", "Bartholomäus", etc… notice "international" characters.

One of my concrete situation: I have a security group defined in AD named "Grupo dirección", but Alfresco's web interface reflects "Grupo direcci?n". Same happens for users and any other data that comes from LDAP source.

This problem makes much more difficult for users to search and manage data.

I can post here my whole ldap-authentication-context.xml if you think it could be helpful.

Thank you and best regards

[andy]

Hi

I have enough information to take a look at this.

Thanks

Andy

[kyjo]

Hello, I think I have the same problem here.

I use v2.1.0 with OpenLDAP - both on a Linux machine. I noticed that yet the  imported xml file from LDAP has wrongly encoded characters. I browsed the source code for a while, but so far I didn't find any clue of what could be wrong.

Was this issue somehow resolved?

[asexto]

No news about this problem for last months. Let me say I think this is an important thing to solve, sure a lot of people use non-english characters imported from LDAP sources. It seems Community edition is not a priority.

[kyjo]

I found out, that my Alfresco/tomcat JVM's default encoding was set to US-ASCII for some reason, while the system encoding was UTF-8. I added to -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 to $CATALINA_OPTS in alfresco/tomcat/bin/catalina.sh and everything seems to work fine now.

alfresco/tomcat/bin/catalina.sh:

…#   CATALINA_OPTS   (Optional) Java runtime options used when the "start",#                   or "run" command is executed.#CATALINA_OPTS="$CATALINA_OPTS -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 "…‍‍‍‍‍‍‍

[asexto]

Thanks kyjo, nice to have news about this issue. Excuse my ignorance, but I'm using a war file so I have no alfresco.sh to edit. What should I change to define UTF encoding?

[bjoern]

Hi,
is there a different solution ?
If i dont want to change the encoding param of the jvm ?
Cheers B