WebObjects 5.2: UTF-8 Exception in WebObjects Web Services

When clients of WebObjects 5.2 Web Services applications submit forms with UTF-8 encoded international characters, WebObjects ignores the content encoding specified by the requests. WebObjects instead returns responses in the default ISO Latin 1 encoding. Web Services clients expecting a UTF-8 encoded response see an ISO Latin 1 encoded response, and can stop responding and produce a java.io.UTFDataFormatException when reading the SOAP envelope.

Sample error:

Error: java.io.UTFDataFormatException: Invalid byte 2 of 2-byte UTF-8 sequence.

Solution

Developers can implement a workaround to set the encoding to the appropriate UTF-8.

1. Override dispatchRequest() by adding the following code to your WOApplication subclass (your Application.java file):
public WOResponse dispatchRequest(WORequest aRequest) {
aRequest.setContentEncoding("UTF-8");
WOResponse aResponse = super.dispatchRequest(aRequest);
aResponse.setContentEncoding("UTF-8");
return aResponse;
}

2. Rebuild and rerun your WebObjects Web Services application.