Symptoms

Special Characters in languages other than English are garbled. (e.g. Chinese Special Characters) or Crowd does not support Unicode when using  Microsoft SQL Server database.

Cause

Following is the default configuration of  <property name="hibernate.dialect">  in <Crowd_Home>\crowd.cfg.xml during crowd installation:

<property name="hibernate.dialect">org.hibernate.dialect.SQLServerDialect </property>

However as it mentioned in documentation, to support Unicode in MS SQL Server 2005 and 2008, Hibernate Dialect field on the Crowd Setup Wizard's database must set to com.atlassian.crowd.util.persistence.hibernate.SQLServerIntlDialect during installation.

Resolution

• Shut down your Crowd

• Go to <Crowd_Home>\crowd.cfg.xml

• Following line appears in crowd.cfg.xml

  <property name="hibernate.dialect">org.hibernate.dialect.SQLServerDialect </property>

• Change above mentioned line to:

  <property name="hibernate.dialect">com.atlassian.crowd.util.persistence.hibernate.SQLServerIntlDialect</property>