Database character set for Social Office

[Sumalatha Nelluri, geändert vor 9 Jahren.]

Hi,
As per Social Office documentation, database charset should be utf8 in order to display user bar properly.
My Liferay database charset is latin1 and i would like to install Social Office upon it, is it possible?

Thanks

[Olaf Kock, geändert vor 9 Jahren.]

I'd expect you to run into problems with this on Liferay as well. Typically - to avoid encoding problems - it's easiest to go with UTF-8 from top to bottom. That's not to say that it wouldn't work with latin-1 (if done correctly). Just if something goes wrong, encoding problems are a beast to fix - especially if they apply to data that has already been persistet.. They are so much of a beast that I'd rather recommend to repeat the setup rather than to fix it. Naturally there are limits, but these limits are high and always painful.

[David H Nebinger, geändert vor 9 Jahren.]

I think whether you run into problems will be based upon the languages that you support. For example, if you were "english-only" then latin-1 should work fine, either for the portal and/or social office.

The problem comes in when you are supporting multiple languages especially those that require UTF-8 for the correct output.

[Sumalatha Nelluri, geändert vor 9 Jahren.]

Thanks for the quick response.
I have used only English language.
I am trying to restore database and install social office on it and i hope that it will not give any issues

[David H Nebinger, geändert vor 9 Jahren.]

I think typically best practice is to use UTF8; even though today you may only need english, by using UTF8 you are prepared for changes tomorrow (and it doesn't hurt to use UTF8 in the mean time).

[Olaf Kock, geändert vor 9 Jahren.]

Even if your content is purely english - you might end up with non-ASCII names of your users. It doesn't need to go as far as asian characters, even a french é - which is very similar to ASCII - can trigger problems.

I'd recommend to do the change rather early than later - e.g. as soon as possible - if you're intending to continue to use this installation. The later you fix the platform's encoding, the more work it will be identifying all of the issues.