UTF-8 encoding with Spring Boot 1.1.1 - utf-8

Question

How can I "say" Spring Boot to use the UTF-8 encoding, to show and save German umlauts correctly?
We are programming a Java-Webapplication using Sping-Boot 1.1.1 (Release) and as webserver a TomCat7 or Jetty. The database is postgresql or h2 for testing.
Edit:
I tried it with the properties file (thanks for the answer), but no changes are visible.
The database is also UTF-8...
Especially the problem comes, when we send a POST-Request to the Webserver.
The Spring-Request-Handler gets already the broken encoded values.
In the following you can see a part of the code:
(It shows a snippet of the Thymeleaf-Template)
<form accept-charset="utf-8" method="post">
<div class="row">
<fieldset th:object="${model}">
<!-- CSRF token -->
<th:block th:replace="makros :: csrf" />
<div class="col-sm-4 form-group" >
<label for="firstname" th:text="#{edit_user.first_name}">Given Name</label>
<input class="form-control required" type="text" required="required" id="firstname" name="firstname" th:field="*{firstName}" />
</div>
<div class="col-sm-4 form-group">
<label for="firstname" th:text="#{edit_user.last_name}">Family Name</label>
<input class="form-control required" type="text" required="required" id="lastname" name="lastname" th:field="*{lastName}" />
</div>
</fieldset>
</div>
</form>
And this is the request handler for that:
#RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.POST)
public String handleUserUpdate(#ModelAttribute(MODEL) UpdateUserCommand command) {
//here we cut the broken encoded values
}
Greetings
Stef

Answer 1

This helped:
spring.datasource.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/securitydb?useUnicode=yes&characterEncoding=UTF-8

Answer 2

What is wrongly encoded? The request or the response? server.tomcat.uri-encoding is switching the URI decoding to UTF-8 (this is already the case for Jetty).
But that does not do anything for the request body. By default, Spring MVC decodes that with ISO-8859-1 (that is the default per the servlet spec). You need to specify a body encoding in your request if you want it to be decoded using UTF-8. Most users are actually using the CharacterEncodingFilter to achieve the same thing (and ensure consistency).
If that fixes your issue, watch out for #1182 that is meant to provide an auto-configuration for that.

Answer 3

The latest should be UTF-8 by default I think? See docs on server.tomcat.uri-encoding: http://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/reference/htmlsingle/#common-application-properties. OTOH it might depend on where you need the encoding to happen (Spring Boot knows nothing about your database server encoding for instance).

Answer 4

You can set UTF-8 as default encoding for spring-boot-maven-plugin.
I create 2 maven profile to run spring boot in UTF-8 and set active spring profile via maven profile:
<profiles>
<profile>
<id>dev</id>
<activation>
<activeByDefault>true</activeByDefault>
</activation>
<build>
<plugins>
<plugin>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
<configuration>
<jvmArguments>-Dfile.encoding=UTF8 -Dspring.profiles.active="dev"</jvmArguments>
</configuration>
</plugin>
</plugins>
</build>
</profile>
<profile>
<id>prod</id>
<build>
<plugins>
<plugin>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
<configuration>
<jvmArguments>-Dfile.encoding=UTF8</jvmArguments>
</configuration>
</plugin>
</plugins>
</build>
</profile>
</profiles>
And run
mvn spring-boot:run for dev profile (application-dev.properties) and
mvn -P prod spring-boot:run for application.properties