How to hold japanese characters in SPRING MVC POJO's field

Question

I am building web application using

1. Spring MVC
2. Spring Security
3. Hibenate
4. MySQl

I want to add internationalization support to my application.e.g. I want to store and retrive japanese characters to mySQL db using Hibernate.

I have set DB charset to UTF-8 and also added property to hibernate-cfg.xml

property name="hibernate.connection.characterEncoding">UTF-8

I have done simple POC in which from java file , I am able to declare some string variable with japanese characters and they are successfully inserted into DB and search by japanese characters is also working fine.

But when on JSP file , i fill up form, all field value are passed to controller in form of POJO, and all japansese characters in POJO's field are sutomatically converted into numerical character references as mentioned in below example,

CreateUser.jsp

<form:form method="post" commandName="userModel">
    <%@include file="/tp/web/iBusinessException.jsp"%>
    <table width="700" border="0" align="center" cellpadding="4"
        cellspacing="0">
        <tr>
            <td class="tdWscHeading">
                <img
                    src="<%=request.getContextPath()%>/tp/web/console/include/images/iconCreateuser.gif"
                    alt="Task Summary" width="20" height="20" align="absmiddle">
                <spring:message code='label.createuser'></spring:message>
            </td>
        </tr>
    </table>
    <table width="700" border="0" align="center" cellpadding="4"
        cellspacing="1" class="tableWscmain">
        <tr>
            <td width="250" class="tdWscContent fontBold">
                <spring:message code='label.firstname'></spring:message>
                <span class="fontRed"> *</span>
            </td>
            <td class="tdWscContent">
                <form:input path="firstname" cssClass="formINPUT"
                    autocomplete="off" />
                <!-- Error Message if Key is Empty Starts -->

                <span class="error"> <spring:bind path="firstname">
                        <c:if test="${not empty status.errorMessage}">
                            <c:out value="${status.errorMessage}" escapeXml="false" />
                        </c:if>
                    </spring:bind> </span>
                <!-- Error Message if key is Empty Ends -->
            </td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td class="tdWscContent fontBold">
                <spring:message code='label.lastname'></spring:message>
                <span class="fontRed"> *</span>
            </td>
            <td class="tdWscContent">
                <form:input path="lastname" cssClass="formINPUT"
                    autocomplete="off" />
                <!-- Error Message if Key is Empty Starts -->
                <span class="error"> <spring:bind path="lastname">
                        <c:if test="${not empty status.errorMessage}">
                            <c:out value="${status.errorMessage}" escapeXml="false" />
                        </c:if>
                    </spring:bind> </span>
                <!-- Error Message if key is Empty Ends -->
            </td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td class="tdWscContent fontBold">
                <spring:message code='label.username'></spring:message>
                <span class="fontRed"> *</span>
            </td>
            <td class="tdWscContent">
                <form:input path="username" cssClass="formINPUT"
                    autocomplete="off" />
                <!-- Error Message if Key is Empty Starts -->
                <span class="error"> <spring:bind path="username">
                        <c:if test="${not empty status.errorMessage}">
                            <c:out value="${status.errorMessage}" escapeXml="false" />
                        </c:if>
                    </spring:bind> </span>


                <!-- Error Message if key is Empty Ends -->
            </td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td class="tdWscContent fontBold">
                <spring:message code='label.password'></spring:message>
                <span class="fontRed"> *</span>
            </td>
            <td class="tdWscContent">
                <form:password path="password" cssClass="formINPUT"
                    autocomplete="off" showPassword="false" />
                <!-- Error Message if Key is Empty Starts -->
                <span class="error"> <spring:bind path="password">
                        <c:if test="${not empty status.errorMessage}">
                            <c:out value="${status.errorMessage}" escapeXml="false" />
                        </c:if>
                    </spring:bind> </span>
                <!-- Error Message if key is Empty Ends -->
            </td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td class="tdWscContent fontBold">
                <spring:message code='label.email'></spring:message>
                <span class="fontRed"> *</span>
            </td>
            <td class="tdWscContent">
                <form:input path="email" cssClass="formINPUT"
                    autocomplete="off" />
                <!-- Error Message if Key is Empty Starts -->
                <span class="error"> <spring:bind path="email">
                        <c:if test="${not empty status.errorMessage}">
                            <c:out value="${status.errorMessage}" escapeXml="false" />
                        </c:if>
                    </spring:bind> </span>
                <!-- Error Message if key is Empty Ends -->
            </td>
        </tr>

        <tr>
            <td class="tdWscContent fontBold">
                <spring:message code='label.groupname'></spring:message>
                <span class="fontRed"> *</span>
            </td>
            <td class="tdWscContent">
                <select id="groupname" name="groupname">
                    <c:forEach items="${GROUPS_LIST_RESULT}" var="option">
                        <option value='<c:out value="${option.groupname}" />'>
                            <c:out value="${option.groupname}" />
                        </option>
                    </c:forEach>
                </select>
                <!-- Error Message if Key is Empty Starts -->
                <span class="error"> <form:errors path="groupname"></form:errors>
                </span>
                <!-- Error Message if key is Empty Ends -->
            </td>
        </tr>

        <tr align="center">
            <td colspan="2" class="tdWscContent fontBold">
                <input type="submit" name=""
                    value="<spring:message code="label.createuser"></spring:message>">
            </td>
        </tr>
    </table>
</form:form>

MyController

@RequestMapping(value = USERADMINISTRATION_NAMESPACE + "/createUser.do", method = RequestMethod.POST)
public ModelAndView submitCreateUserPage(
        @ModelAttribute("userModel") User user, BindingResult result

) throws UserAlreadyExistsException {
    String password = "";
    password = user.getPassword();

/* Here , password i am getting like **¤** ,  */
/* I want exactly same Japanese characters as entered by user */
}

I have not use any character encoding filter in my application.

From jsp to controller , it is automatically converted into such above number.. I want exactly same Japanese characters as entered by user in jsp and want to insert same into DB and display on page.

I am passing all user input field's value from JSP to controller as a POJO.

Please help...

Answer 1

Finally I succeed in implementing internationalization support in my Spring MVC based application....

I have followed below steps to incorporate internationalization support to my web application using Spring MVC, Hibernate , MYSQL or Oracle Database and Jboss or webLogic as a application server.

Let's say we want to add internationalization support for Japanese language.i.e user should be able to enter Japanese characters in web forms and it should be saved in same format as entered by user and also should be displayed in same language on web page.

Follow below steps.

1. Make sure you have Japanese language support (Region specific installation) installed into operating system. If not, please install it.

2. If you are using any IDE then configure IDE to support Japanese language by changing text encoding to UTF-8. For example,If you are using my Eclipse then change text file encoding to UTF-8. You can change by this path (Window->Preference->General->Workspace)

3. Place Spring framework’s in built character encoding filter as a first filter in filter chain (web.xml) to make sure it runs first during request processing and runs last during response processing

web.xml

<filter>  
    <filter-name>encodingFilter</filter-name>
<filter-class>org.springframework.web.filter.CharacterEncodingFilter</filter-class>
<init-param>
    <param-name>encoding</param-name>
    <param-value>UTF-8</param-value>
</init-param>
<init-param>
    <!-- set forceEncoding to true if you want to override encoding of servlet -->
    <param-name>forceEncoding</param-name>
    <param-value>true</param-value> 
</init-param>

<filter-mapping>
    <filter-name>encodingFilter</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>

4 Set JSP Page encoding to UTF-8 by adding below mentioned code at top of JSP.

<%@ page language="java" pageEncoding="UTF-8" contentType="text/html;charset=UTF-8"%>

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

5 Set Hibernate connection encoding scheme to UTF-8 by adding following property to hibernate-cfg.xml

<property name="hibernate.connection.characterEncoding">UTF-8</property>

Note : If using JBoss application server, please make sure you have appended characterEncoding=UTF-8 to connection-url in database service configuration file (For ex. mysql-ds.xml for mySQL database) as mentioned below.

<datasources>

<local-tx-datasource>

    <jndi-name>WSCDS</jndi-name>

   <connection-url>
   jdbc:mysql://{ipaddress}:{port}/{database_name}?characterEncoding=UTF-8
   </connection-url>

<driver-class>com.mysql.jdbc.Driver</driver-class>

<user-name>{username}</user-name>

<password>{password}</password>  

<metadata>

   <type-mapping>mySQL</type-mapping>

</metadata>

Answer 2

You need to use character encoding filter. Spring framework has a built-in character encoding filter. (see here) Simply put it in your web.xml:

<filter>
    <filter-name>encodingFilter</filter-name>
    <filter-class>org.springframework.web.filter.CharacterEncodingFilter</filter-class>
    <init-param>
        <param-name>encoding</param-name>
        <param-value>UTF-8</param-value>
    </init-param>
    <init-param>
        <!-- set forceEncoding to true if you want to override encoding of servlet -->
        <param-name>forceEncoding</param-name>
        <param-value>true</param-value> 
    </init-param>
</filter>

Put this filter in the first place in filter chain to make sure it runs first during request processing and runs last during response processing.

Answer 3

You've mentioned, that you are not using any character filter. Please try adding one in web.xml. As far as I know, that is mandatory to be able to handle UTF-8 properly.