UTF-8 only in Grails 1.1 database tables

Question

When using Grails 1.1 together with a MySQL the charsets of the auto-generated database tables seem to default to ISO-8859-1. I'd rather have everything stored as pure UTF-8. Is that possible?

From the auto-generated database definitions:

ENGINE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=1 DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

Note the "latin1" part.

A work-around that works for Grails 1.0 is described here. This work-arounds does not appear to work when using Grails 1.1. The dataSource.dialect parameter seems to be ignored.

Answer 1

It seems like the default character set of the database is used.

I solved this by creating the database with utf8 as the default character set:

CREATE DATABASE name_of_database DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8;

Answer 2

You can also add some properties to the Hibernate / JDBC url in your DataSource.groovy file. For example

url = "jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/your-db-name?useUnicode=true"

MySQL has other parameters related to character sets as well. I'm not quite sure which and how many of them you need to get the expected behavior.

Answer 3

Hi I was having similar problem where reading from MySQL was fine but writing converted some characters to "?" (question mark). This solved it: url = "jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/your-db-name?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=utf-8

mh23