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Siebel Is Incorrectly using Java Encoding Instead of URL Encoding for Form Submission HTTP POST Request. (Doc ID 2725906.1)

Last updated on MARCH 23, 2022

Applies to:

Siebel CRM - Version 19.7 and later
Information in this document applies to any platform.

Symptoms

The Siebel application is not encoding certain special characters correctly for HTTP POST requests.


When you do common task in the application such as creating a new record or performing a query on an applet, there is a HTTP POST request that is sent from the client to the server. It was observed that when you enter certain special characters, it is not encoding the characters correctly. It appears that the application is using Java encoded characters instead of the expected URL encoding.

Users may potentially copy text from applications such as Microsoft Word and paste it to a Siebel field with these special characters. Some examples of special characters that were observed with issues are the following:

― ‗ ‘― ’ ‚‛– “”„†‡•…‰′″‹›‼‾⁄⁊


You can observe a POST request by using network tools such as a network sniffer or the browsers "Developer Tools" which allows you to see the parameters that are sent in the request. For instance, the 'En Dash' character is commonly copied from MS Words documents and shows as %u2013, which is a Java encoding. Instead, it should be using the URL encoding which encodes as %e2%80%93€“.


The expected behavior is that the Siebel application should encode all characters as URL encoding.


For example, the following steps can be performed to reproduce the problem:
1. Use a browser with "Developer Tools". In this example, we will use Firefox.

2. Navigate to any view in the application. In this case we can use the Contact List View.

3. Start "Developer Tools" and navigate to the "Network" tab of the tool.

4. Perform a query in the 'Last Name' field using:

Return – Store

Note the special character that looks like a normal 'Dash' character, but is actually an 'En Dash' character which is slightly longer.

5. Execute the query, and you will see that the encoding shows as Return+%u2013+Store (the character is encoded as –), which is incorrect. This should be Return+%e2%80%93€+Store.



Due to this issue, this can have impacts on other applications that uses the HTTP POST request.

Cause

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In this Document
Symptoms
Cause
Solution
References


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