Base not decoding Western charset correctly with sdbc:firebird
I am working with LibreOffice 6.0.7.3.
[Details: Libre Office base (Linux/Ubuntu): Version: 6.0.7.3 Build-ID: 1:6.0.7-0ubuntu0.18.04.2 OS: Linux 4.15; UI-Render: Standard; VCL: gtk3; language German (de_DE.UTF-8)]
I connect to an existing Firebird 3.0 database via the sdbc driver (direct connection, no jdbc or odbc). Connection string/database path: "file:///home/.../Databasename.fdb". My firebird database is encoded in ISO8859_1 ("Western", 8-bit charset), whereas my LibreOffice encodes in UTF-8.
Unfortunately, LibreOffice cannot read the special characters of the database (in German: the Umlauts). Instead it produces the question marks in black diamonds. It obviously does not translate between the ISO8859_1 charset of the database and its own UTF-8 charset.
Comment: With LibreOffice 5.x I had to connect via the JDBC driver (JAVA) to the database. More tedious to set up! But I could add "?encoding=ISO8859_1" to the connections string/database path and it would decode correctly. However, this does not work now.
How can I make it decode the ISO8859_1 character set correctly with the new sdbc connection? Or do I have to go back to the JAVA connection? I'd like to keep the new sdbc-connection, as it is easy to establish (no JAVA drivers necessary) and it is fast.
Thanks for an answer!
Xenon1
By the way - how do you connect to FB using SDBC? I thought it's only possible using ODBC/JDBC. Or do you mean you open FB database file in file mode, not to an external FB server?
Mike, with LibreOffice 6.0 or maybe 6.1 you can connect directly: Open a new instance of LibreOffice Base: Choose Connect to an existing data base | open with a click on the downward triangle | Choose Firbird. There you are! It is really nice and quick.
I'd say - file a bug report,attaching a sample database (both ODB and FBD (or whatever extension the Firebird DB has)). That would allow to reproduce, check for possible solutions, or fix it if it's a bug. Please create a new sample DB, or anonimize existing one before upload.