IBM® WebFacing Tool DBCS UTF-8 Error on Portal server

When running a WebFacing Portlet project on a DBCS system, you may run into a problem where the first screen appears correctly but the next screen displays a UTF-8 encoding error.

This problem can occur when deploying the WebFacing Portlet project to an i5/OS® WebSphere® Portal Server or in the WebSphere Portal Test Environment. The problem is related to the default encoding setting on the Portal server, which is UTF-8 for most languages, but not all. The default values that are used are:
      Japanese ja                       = Shift_JIS
      Simplified Chinese zh             = GBK
      Traditional Chinese zh_TW, HTML   = Big5
      Traditional Chinese zh_TW, WML    = UTF-8
      Korean ko                         = KSC5601
      All others                        = UTF-8

Circumvention

A circumvention to this problem is to change these defaults using the portal administration.

To do this, select Administration, Portal settings, Supported markups. Select the markup for which you want to change the character set, select Edit selected markup, then Set locale-specific settings. Select the language for which you want to make the change, and Edit setting for selected language. Now you can change the character set for the selected language in the selected markup.

For example, change the setting from:

Japanese (ja)   HTML     Shift_JIS      

to:

Japanese (ja)   HTML     UTF-8
Note: If you are using the WebSphere Portal Test Environment, you must enable the administration before you can change the above setting. To do this, open the WebSphere Portal v5.1 Test Environment server configuration by double clicking on it in the Server Configuration view. In the editor that opens, select the Portal tab and make sure that the "Enable base portlets for portal administration and customization" is selected.

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