Hibernate Session's get() function retrieves question marks instead of greek characters - spring

Question

I have a web application that uses spring and hibernate. My hibernate session factory is configured in spring as:
<bean id="mySessionFactory" class="org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.annotation.AnnotationSessionFactoryBean">
<property name="dataSource" ref="myDataSource" />
<property name="configurationClass">
<value>org.hibernate.cfg.AnnotationConfiguration</value>
</property>
<property name="hibernateProperties">
<props>
<prop key="hibernate.show_sql">true</prop>
<prop key="hibernate.dialect">org.hibernate.dialect.SQLServer2005Dialect</prop>
<prop key="hibernate.cache.use_query_cache">false</prop>
<prop key="hibernate.cache.use_second_level_cache">false</prop>
</props>
</property>
<property name="packagesToScan">
<list>
<value>com.example.dslibweb.model</value>
</list>
</property>
</bean>
The data source as:
<bean id="myDataSource" class="org.apache.commons.dbcp.BasicDataSource">
<property name="driverClassName" value="${jdbc.driverClassName}" />
<property name="url" value="${jdbc.url}" />
<property name="username" value="${jdbc.username}" />
<property name="password" value="${jdbc.password}" />
<property name="maxActive" value="${jdbc.maxConnections}" />
</bean>
and the properties file for the data source is:
jdbc.username=sa
jdbc.password=***
jdbc.url=jdbc:sqlserver://10.62.0.105:1433;databaseName=example;useUnicode=true;characterEncoding=utf-8
jdbc.driverClassName=com.microsoft.sqlserver.jdbc.SQLServerDriver
jdbc.maxConnections=-1
I have a call:
DsActions action = (DsActions) this.hibernateCriteriaCommons.findById(id, new DsActions());
and findById is defined as:
public T findById(String id, Object model) {
return (T) this.sessionFactory.getCurrentSession().get(model.getClass(), id);
}
So I am calling the get method of hibernate session for a specific id and I expect an instance of type DsActions.
All works well when I run it from a local Tomcat instance (run through netbeans).
When I install it on a remote tomcat server, the instance of DsActions seems to have an encoding issue. When retriveing a field of DsActions instance I get question marks (??? ?????? ??????). The text is supposed to be greek characters
I am very confused, I do not understand why in the first case it is working and not in the second.
Note: the data is retrieved by the same database server, so no difference there. The only difference is the machine where the application is running.
Thank you all in advance.

Answer 1

I'm pretty sure that Hibernate retrieves that field correctly, and the problem is in the way you output these characters.
As a quick check you can add a condition such as f.contains("?") to your code and output its result - it should be false (if original string doesn't contain ?s, of course).
For possible problems in output see Unicode - How to get the characters right?.