CM 9.2.1 - Saving symbols in records

[Joanna Thompson]

Hi,

We just moved from TRIM 7.2.1 to CM 9.2.1, and are having an issue regarding the use of symbols in text fields.

We deal regularly with indigenous names, e.g. Ẁaẁaƛ, Ugʷiwa’, and since moving to CM, we can't save titles/notes, etc. that contain these spellings. We used to be able to in TRIM, and if it saw a character it didn't recognize, it would add an upside down question mark in place of it, and save, which was a bit annoying but at least we got the records in the system.

We have the system options set to ignore characters, but each time we try to save a record, we get the error: "The Title (Free Text Part) field contains invalid information."

One dataset also has the spell check turned off, and it still won't save.

Our old legacy system from way back in the 90's allows these characters but CM doesn't? It's really important that these names are entered correctly. How can we get this to work for us?

[Sten28]

It is likely that your dataset has been set up with ANSI encoding. This does not have a broad range of supported characters. Older TRIM systems would replace unsupported characters with question marked like you have mentioned.

An alternative to ANSI, called Unicode, supports a much larger number of characters. If you have a Unicode-based dataset, you should have little issue with saving symbol-based names, without them being replaced like the old ANSI method.

You can confirm your encoding type via Enterprise Studio, listed against your dataset i.e. "Active, [ANSI/Unicode], Schema up to date (309)".

Enterprise Studio comes with built-in tools to convert your dataset from ANSI to Unicode - keep in mind, this process will take your environment offline, and taking a database backup beforehand is advisable.

[Joanna Thompson]

Thanks so much. I'll talk to our Information Management Branch about this. It could be the solution. :)