Character Encoding UTF-8 with JPA/Hibernate, MySql and Tomcat

I'm writing a little Java application using JPA (Hibernate implementation) and Spring. The application will run on Tomcat and uses MySql as the RDBMS.

The problem I had today was with the good old character encoding: I was able to store German Umlaut characters (üöä) properly in MySql, but whenever I retrieved them, they would be scrambled - regardless of whether I displayed the result on a web page or just printed it to the console.

So, the problem is: how to consistently set UTF-8 as the character encoding of choice throughout the whole stack:

• for MySql as well as for any session coming through the JDBC driver in order to ensure that any entity created by Hibernate/JPA uses UTF-8
  
• for Tomcat to make sure that any data served uses UTF-8
  

I know that you'll find a lot of material on the solution for each individual piece of software in my tech stack across the net. However, I still think it's worth to post this solution as I did not find all elements of it in one place (and don't want to search again the next time :-)

Here's what I did:

1. Ensure that MySql runs on UTF-8 as default: in the MySql configuration file my.cnf add the following in the section for mysqld:

[mysqld]
...
default-character-set=utf8
default-collation=utf8_general_ci
...

2. Configure your MySql JDBC driver connection as follows (obviously hostname, port and schema are probably different in your configuration :-):

jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/test?useUnicode=true&connectionCollation=utf8_general_ci&characterSetResults=utf8

When configuring the above driver URL in your Spring XML context definition, don't forget to escape the Ampersand as you will get parsing errors otherwise.

3. Configure Tomcat for UTF-8 by adding the following line to your : catalina.bat or catalina.sh:

JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -Djavax.servlet.request.encoding=UTF-8 -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8"

Versions I am using: MySql 5.0, Tomcat 6.0.20, Spring 2.5.6, Java 6, MySql Connector 5.1.6

Happy hacking!

Been a long time since I have posted anything. Got dragged into some, well - let's say, interesting work in my day job. Done some programming anyway.

GWT-Ext or SmartClient based GUI wiht a JPA/Spring/MySQL/JAX-B/JAX-RS driven backend. And I'm using Envers for auditing - I love it.

Got fed up writing all those REST requests, so basically just set up a service with a Groovy engine behind. This allows me to just send scripts using my plain POJO domain model from the GUI without having to expose every little piece of functionality as a REST service. All the while every script execution returns a piece of XML driving the AJAX GUI. On this front I love the store-based model of SmartClient over the store based model of GWT-Ext (because of the CRUD service hooks).

Need to play around with the Groovy bit some more - but I can almost hear the critics yell "SECURITY ISSUE"!

Protecting the whole thing with CAS and aspect-driven security on the server side for method execution as well as data retrievals/updates using JPA.

Need to play with this a bit more and will provide some code here. Watch this space...