JBoss - Spring URL UTF-8 encoding

If you need to pass special characters in the request parameters, the browser will encode them by using the specified encoding. This is the case, for example, when using the JQuery serialize method to compose a URL with the elements inside a form.

In my case, the problem arose when I was trying to load a jqGrid base table. The user fills some fields inside a form and when she presses the search button, a jqGrid is created and a request is sent to a Spring MVC Controller.

$("#myGrid").jqGrid({
      url: '/myapp/mypage/search?+ $('#myForm').serialize(),
      loadonce:true,
      mtype: 'GET',
      datatype: "json",
      (...)
});

When some field inside "myForm" has special characters, for example 'áéíóú', the URL generated will be as follows:

http://localhost:8080/myapp/mypage/search?descripcion=%C3%A1%C3%A9%C3%AD%C3%B3%C3%BA&_search=false&nd=1477817915534&rows=20&page=1&sidx=&sord=asc

These values are the result of converting the input text to UTF-8. Inside the controller you would see ANSI characters but the application is expecting UTF-8.

The solution is to configure URI encoding in JBoss EAP 6.2 connector using the following standalone.xml configuration:

<system-properties>
     <property name="org.apache.catalina.connector.URI_ENCODING" value="UTF-8"/>
     <property name="org.apache.catalina.connector.USE_BODY_ENCODING_FOR_QUERY_STRING" value="true"/>
</system-properties>

In domain mode you can configure these properties at server level or server group level.
There are more useful JBoss properties I collected in a previous post: http://trabajosdesisifo.blogspot.com.es/2015/12/jboss-useful-system-properties.html

Anyway, if you are working with UTF-8, don't forget the the Spring CharacterEncodingFilter.