Oracle ADF and International Characters

My team is developing application in Oracle ADF with internationalization support. When we did preliminary tests, we have noticed that we can't save local characters to database, entered characters simply were transformed to code representation. Our database character set is not UTF-8, but local. We were lucky to find very elegant solution - just to change content type charset of our pages. We have changed it to UTF-8, inside our JSPX pages, and ADF automatically transforms it to database character set. This means, same approach works when we have UTF-8 charset in database, or any local charset as well.

You can download my sample application - ADFInternationalChars.zip, where you can test how it works on your database.

Let's say we have simple form:


And type text in local language for First Name field, this time in Russian. When user will want to store this record and will invoke Commit, local language characters will be transformed to unreadable form by default:


I saw people are asking related questions quite frequently on OTN forums. Actually solution is simple, we just need to change page content type charset from default one:


To UTF-8 charset:


This will allow to accept local characters on JSPX page and to transfer them through ADF Business Components to database. And now Russian text is saved to database without problems:


And if to check database, here is this text stored:


Finally, its important to mention, that if your database is installed with UTF-8 support, you can store all local characters. But, if you have database with specific character set, you can store only this specific charset from JSPX pages. Its good thing you dont need to modify your JSPX pages in both cases, just declare UTF-8 for page charset encoding. My database is installed with UTF-8 charset: