Search in my WEB-application works only with latin symbols when I deploy it on openshift, but it works fine on my local machine

Question

I have a problem. I made a WAB-application by Spring MVC & Hibernate and it has a search. Problem is the search works only with latin symbols when I deploy the WEB-application on openshift. It doesn't work with cyrillic. But it works very well on my local machine. So I have no idea what it can be. I have the same database on openshift that on my local machine and I did a dump of my data and imported it to openshift.

This is the method of search:

public List<News> getNewsWithSubstring(String str) {
    Session session = sessionFactory.getCurrentSession();
    Criteria crt = session.createCriteria(News.class);
    Disjunction disjunction = Restrictions.disjunction();
    disjunction.add(Restrictions.like("titleUa", "%" + str + "%"));
    disjunction.add(Restrictions.like("titleEn", "%" + str + "%"));
    disjunction.add(Restrictions.like("titleRu", "%" + str + "%"));
    disjunction.add(Restrictions.like("descriptionUa", "%" + str + "%"));
    disjunction.add(Restrictions.like("descriptionEn", "%" + str + "%"));
    disjunction.add(Restrictions.like("descriptionRu", "%" + str + "%"));
    crt.add(disjunction);
    return crt.list();
}

This is the settings of connect to db (from springServlet-context.xml):

 <bean name="sessionFactory" class="org.springframework.orm.hibernate4.LocalSessionFactoryBean">
    <property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource"/>
    <property name="packagesToScan" value="com.goldcamtech.model"/>
    <property name="hibernateProperties">
        <props>
            <prop key="hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto">update</prop>
            <prop key="hibernate.dialect">org.hibernate.dialect.MySQLDialect</prop>
            <prop key="c3p0.idle_test_period">120</prop>
            <prop key="hibernate.connection.characterEncoding">utf8</prop>
        </props>
    </property>
</bean>

<bean name="dataSource" class="org.apache.commons.dbcp2.BasicDataSource">
    <property name="driverClassName" value="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"/>
    <property name="url" value="jdbc:mysql://127.18.97.4:3306/gctech_site?autoReconnect=true&amp;useUnicode=true&amp;characterEncoding=utf-8"/>
    <property name="username" value="username"/>
    <property name="password" value="password"/>
</bean>

<bean id="transactionManager" class="org.springframework.orm.hibernate4.HibernateTransactionManager">
    <property name="sessionFactory" ref="sessionFactory"/>
</bean>

Maybe someone has any idea? Why does it work with latin and cyrillic on my local machine but doesn't work with cyrillic on openshift? Thanks!

Answer 1

Most likely the problem lies in default configuration of MySQL on your local machine and MySQL at OpenShift. I suggest to compare the CHARACTER SET on the tables/database. If you didn't specify it explicitly when creating tables/database MySQL will use default value from my.cnf

See also: Database Character Set and Collation

P.S. Also be warned, that code like this

disjunction.add(Restrictions.like("titleUa", "%" + str + "%"));

may work wrong in some situations (for instance, if user's string contains % or _ characters) and even more, it may cause SQL injection.