Camel - Drools rules encoding

Question

I have a Drools decision table in Excel(97/2000 format), and some of the strings used in rules have non-ascii characters like umlauts (Ä). When I build rules package with Camel-Drools integration module in Ubuntu 12.04LTS from this decision table, I get wrong characters in rules source.

For instance,

in spreadsheet -> Ääripää tässä tapauksessa,

in built drl file -> ��rip�� t�ss� tapauksessa

If I use exact same excel files in Windows/Ubuntu/Mac (Eclipse or IDEA makes no difference) development machines or even in Vagrant/VirtualBox/Ubuntu environment, there is no character encoding problems with drools rules.

Code is packaged into Spring-boot Jar-file, which contains Jetty server where application is deplyed. This same JAr file has been used to test in every different environment, but only one failing is the cloud-based testing environment.

Testing Environment is built up with Kitchen & Chef cookbooks and it is a cloud environment, haven't got the foggiest what is the difference between cloud environment and dev envs.

Have tried formatting excel files to UTF-8 encoding, but it seems impossible. And Camel-Drools integration module should have this fixed in their next release (6.0.0 https://issues.jboss.org/browse/JBRULES-2936) but that is still in beta and not usable yet. Nor have I got their timetable for stable release.

Anyone got a clue how to resolve this?

Answer 1

Reason found!

The cloud environment we use was configured with chef, and somehow the cookbook set character encoding to non-UTF whenever it rebooted cloud instance.

Hence the file was not recognized as UTF, as environment was telling java to use something else.

Thanks for comments and help all!

Answer 2

Use the overloaded methods to specify the encoding when telling drools about the XLS:

public interface KieResources extends Service {

Resource newUrlResource(URL url);

Resource newUrlResource(URL url,
                        String encoding);

Resource newUrlResource(String path);

Resource newUrlResource(String path,
                        String encoding);

Resource newFileSystemResource(File file);

Resource newFileSystemResource(File file,
                               String encoding);

...

}

If you don't do that, it will use the default encoding of the Java platform which uses the default of the operation system (UTF-8 on linux, windows-1252 on a French Windows machine, ...)