how to put ampersand (&) in a jdbc url?

Question

I have a dynamic application with glassfish server and using EclipseLink (JPA 2.1). I used to could put jdbc configuration in the persistence.xml directly and didn't have any problem. But now it forces me to create a datasource name for glassfish and putting jdbc configuration into glassfish-resources.xml file.

the problem is that I want to set character encoding for mysql to utf8 and thus, I used below url for jdbc url:

jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/fastfood?zeroDateTimeBehavior=convertToNull;&characterEncoding=UTF-8;

but i get this exception:

javax.persistence.PersistenceException: Exception [EclipseLink-4002] (Eclipse Persistence Services - 2.5.0.v20130507-3faac2b): org.eclipse.persistence.exceptions.DatabaseException
Internal Exception: java.sql.SQLException: Error in allocating a connection. Cause: Connection could not be allocated because: The connection property 'zeroDateTimeBehavior' only accepts values of the form: 'exception', 'round' or 'convertToNull'. The value 'convertToNull;' is not in this set.

I want to know how to add multiple parameters in the url with ampersand? :D

also I want not to create a JNDI data source, instead I put the jdbc properties in the persistence.xml manually and ensured that I specified the JDBC driver correctly and added the MySQL JDBC driver to library, but I got the error message saying:

"no suitable driver found"

the complete content of the glassfish-resource is as following:

<resources>
    <jdbc-connection-pool allow-non-component-callers="false" associate-with-thread="false" connection-creation-retry-attempts="0" connection-creation-retry-interval-in-seconds="10" connection-leak-reclaim="false" connection-leak-timeout-in-seconds="0" connection-validation-method="auto-commit" datasource-classname="com.mysql.jdbc.jdbc2.optional.MysqlDataSource" fail-all-connections="false" idle-timeout-in-seconds="300" is-connection-validation-required="false" is-isolation-level-guaranteed="true" lazy-connection-association="false" lazy-connection-enlistment="false" match-connections="false" max-connection-usage-count="0" max-pool-size="32" max-wait-time-in-millis="60000" name="mysql_rootPool" non-transactional-connections="false" pool-resize-quantity="2" res-type="javax.sql.DataSource" statement-timeout-in-seconds="-1" steady-pool-size="8" validate-atmost-once-period-in-seconds="0" wrap-jdbc-objects="false">
        <property name="serverName" value=""/>
        <property name="User" value="root"/>
        <property name="Password" value=""/>
        <property name="URL" value="jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/fastfood?zeroDateTimeBehavior=convertToNull;&amp;characterEncoding=UTF-8;"/>
        <property name="driverClass" value="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"/>
    </jdbc-connection-pool>
    <jdbc-resource enabled="true" jndi-name="Fastfood" object-type="user" pool-name="mysql_rootPool"/>
</resources>

Answer 1

Try to turn;& into just & and make sure to remove the leading semicolon. I think it is trying to read the value of convertToNull as convertToNull;, which is invalid...

So...

jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/fastfood?zeroDateTimeBehavior=convertToNull;&characterEncoding=UTF-8;

would become:

jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/fastfood?zeroDateTimeBehavior=convertToNull&characterEncoding=UTF8;

edit: also try removing the dash from utf-8 per https://stackoverflow.com/a/3042646/623952

There's a lot of information out there but I can't personally help you troubleshoot why it isn't taking the setting. Your initial error was because the querystring was incorrect. This is now a settings problem...

JDBC MySQL UTF-8 string writing problem
problem with utf8 in java

Answer 2

The problem is the semicolon before the ampersand escape. Just remove it.

Answer 3

jdbc:mysql://1.1.1.1:3306/dev?useUnicode=yes&characterEncoding=UTF-8

connection string above works for me. so like @EJP said, remove the first semi-colon.