Invalid characters saved in database

Finance and Operations/AX Developer Forum
1

Hi all,

I am using AX2012 R2 and have a very complex problem in AX. Sometimes we have invalid characters saved in the database, you don’t see it in the forms but when you export the files to XML they will appear. After that we have an error in the application who is trying to read this XML.

Example: a customer number looks like 226699 but when you export it to XML “??226699” will be exported. Or characters like “&#x1F” will be se shown in the XML in a text.

Anyone any idea how to fix this issue? Offcourse I can check/clean the data before exporting. But this will be a big performance killer…

Thanks in advance!

2

Are you sure that these characters are in database and not merely added during export? You said you looked at forms and exported files, but you didn’t mention checking the data directly in database.

If you have them in database, cleaning the exported data doesn’t sound like a good approach to me. I think you should fix the data in database.

I also wonder how you’ve got into this situation. Won’t things like the control character (&#x1F) be put into database by a broken data import?

3

Hi Martin,

Thanks for your reaction!

Yes, I am sure they are not added during export. At 1 example it can be possible that this kind of characters where imported during an Excel import ("&#x1F") , but my other example “??226699” is definitely not. After renaming that field (rename primary key function) the issue is fixed…

Any other idea?