Spanish accented characters display incorrectly - Service Catalog

Products

• CA Service Catalog

Issue/Introduction

In CA Service Catalog 14.1 and higher, Spanish special characters (such as accents or tildes) may not display correctly in the user interface. This usually manifests as garbled text or incorrect symbols where accented letters should appear. This issue occurs when the Tomcat application server is not configured to handle UTF-8 URI encoding.

Symptoms:

• Spanish accented characters (e.g., á, é, í, ó, ú, ñ) display as question marks, blocks, or corrupted text strings.  See example below
• Catalog offerings or descriptions containing Spanish regional characters are unreadable.

Environment

• Product: CA Service Catalog
• Version: 14.1 and higher
• Component: Tomcat Web Server

Cause

The URIEncoding="UTF-8" parameter is not defined in the Tomcat server.xml file. Without this attribute, Tomcat does not correctly interpret non-ASCII characters passed through URIs.

Resolution

Follow these steps to enable UTF-8 encoding in the Service Catalog Tomcat configuration:

1. Create a backup of the server.xml file located in the %USM_HOME%\view\conf directory.
2. Open the server.xml file in a text editor.
3. Locate the HTTP or HTTPS connector section (depending on which protocol is in use) and add the following attribute: URIEncoding="UTF-8" Example for HTTPS: <Connector port="8443" protocol="HTTP/1.1" SSLEnabled="true" URIEncoding="UTF-8" ... />
4. Locate the AJP connector section (typically around lines 29–30) and add the same attribute: URIEncoding="UTF-8"
5. Save the changes to the server.xml file.
6. Restart the CA Service Catalog services.
7. Clear the browser cache on the client machine.
8. Log into Service Catalog and verify that the characters display correctly.