In the former parts of this series I wrote about the encoding problem we encountered using the standard MOSS 2007 content deployment. In this part I will shortly describe a workaround and the final solution.
The workaround we created was a "simple" command line tool that iterates through the sites and pages. The special characters were stored as a constant string array and we computed the corresponding “encoded” characters at runtime based on the rules we descried in the previous parts. We replaced all "encoded" characters into the original one in all off the fields that can contain text information. This process required considerable time, especially as we had pages that contain Russian text and it is full with special characters. We had to extend the array of special characters as users add more and more content with characters we did not include originally into the array. Also, it was not easy to synchronize the correction process with the content deployment.
We experimenting with other methods, like creating event receiver that replaces the special characters "on-the-fly" as content deployment pushes content to the publishing server. Unfortunately, it seems that event receivers do not fire as expected when content created through content deployment. Probably it has performance reasons.
Other "nice try" was handling the problem on the database level. We created a simple tool that corrected the content directly through the content database. We even planned to create some kind of INSTEAD OF TRIGGER that inserts the corrected content instead of the "encoded" one by calling managed code to restore the original content.
Fortunately we should not have to go live with this workaround as Microsoft released a hotfix for this issue and we receive that patch. After installing the hotfix we have no more problems with special characters.
Posted
10-24-2007 9:17 PM
by
pholpar