Special characters in BODS 4.1

system · July 1, 2013, 1:13pm

Hi,
We are loading data from a table in BODS 4.1 . Data in the source table has special characters like ª . These appear as ‘?’ in 4.1 designer. We want to pass these special characters as they are.

Thanks.

Aswathi (BOB member since 2013-07-01)

system · July 1, 2013, 1:42pm

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Marek Chladny (BOB member since 2003-11-27)

system · July 1, 2013, 4:01pm

You say small letter ‘a’ is a special character? or i am missing some thing.

Arun

Arun.K (BOB member since 2011-10-18)

system · July 1, 2013, 5:45pm

When you say they are appearing as ‘?’ in designer, is that when you are looking at the source table using the data viewer?

What is your target?

Is it a database table? Are the columns NVARCHAR type? I would test using a template table, you can set it to use NVARCHAR by double clicking the target table > Click the options tab> under ‘Miscellaneous’ set ‘Use NVARCHAR…’ to ‘yes’

tim_pank (BOB member since 2011-10-12)

system · July 2, 2013, 2:54pm

Yes. When I look at the source table using data viewer, the special characters appear as ‘?’. Target is a DB table.
The columns are of type varchar. I tried to load to a template table, it still shows question marks.

The special character is not ‘a’. It has a line beneath. I’m unable to paste it here.

Aswathi (BOB member since 2013-07-01)

system · July 2, 2013, 4:42pm

Hi, there are numerous topics on this subject. You should configure your datastore based on the codepage of the database.

This Wiki should help you
http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/EIM/Multiple+Codepages

ganeshxp (BOB member since 2008-07-17)

system · July 2, 2013, 7:08pm

Would it be possible to take the value in a notepad and analyze using Edit plus and see whats actually shown?

Arun

Arun.K (BOB member since 2011-10-18)

system · July 2, 2013, 7:42pm

Hex character value for that word is AA

ganeshxp (BOB member since 2008-07-17)

system · August 6, 2013, 2:20pm

Are you sure this is not caused by the target table database collation.

Just run some manual sql copying the data over into your target, and see if it appears (it may not be a problem with BODS).

Problems I have had previously with BODS is that it has a tendency to want to collate everything in binary when doing table comparisons etc. - regardless if you state the codepage in the datastore and on the data services language/locale.

Really you are likely for those characters to go through…if you are still suspicious, try loading that particular data straight into a flat file that is UTF-16 etc. (eliminates any problems with target db).

John_F_Sheppey (BOB member since 2009-10-16)

system · August 6, 2013, 4:33pm

Are you referring to the nls_sort() function in the ORDER BY? This is DS being overly pessimistic. There are a couple of work arounds for this.

eganjp (BOB member since 2007-09-12)