Special Characters in Spring MVC

You might be surprised to see when you type special characters on the form and in the controller, it comes in wrong e.g.

I typed a copy right sign, "©".  It came in as "©".

Even though I have already set my page's encoding to UTF-8, it didn't work.

The problem is Spring tried to encode using ISO-8859-1 still.  I think it is because, per Servlet standard, that is the default request/response encoding.

The solution is simple; we just have to explicitly set the encoding we want using CharacterEncodingFilter.  Thank to a post in Spring Forum.

Add the following to your web.xml.

<filter>
   <filter-name>springCharacterEncodingFilter</filter-name>
   <filter-class>org.springframework.web.filter.CharacterEncodingFilter</filter-class>
   <init-param>
     <param-name>encoding</param-name>
     <param-value>UTF-8</param-value>
   </init-param>
   <init-param>
     <param-name>forceEncoding</param-name>
     <param-value>true</param-value>
   </init-param>
   </filter>
 
 <filter-mapping>
   <filter-name>springCharacterEncodingFilter</filter-name>
   <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
 </filter-mapping>

Daily Puppy

I love Daily Puppy. 

It's my fix of the day!

Talking about dogs, there is a dog parade hosted by Justin Rudd of HautedDogs.org.

Sun, Oct 26, 2:30 p.m. 

The start/finish is at Livingston Park, 4900 E. Livingston Dr. (@ Park Ave. in Belmont Shore), Long Beach, 90803.

More at http://www.hautedogs.org/howloween.html

jQuery.ScrollTo and Dynamic Content

I have a page which displays dynamic content pulled from the database.  I need to scroll the page to a specific element upon loading, so I look around and found that jQuery.ScrollTo is very helpful. I could write a code as simple as

$.scrollTo($('#div1'), 500)

where 

$('#div1') is the element I want my page to scroll to and 

500 is a length (in millisec) of animation showing a page scrolls from the top to that element.

Nice, right?

I stuck the code in $(document).ready() function. Rendered it in IE8. Looked Great. 

Tried in Firefox3. Ding! It doesn't work. I would expect the result the other way around... ;P

So, I tried another option - passing absolute position instead jquery object to scrollTo method.

$(document).ready(function() {

var pos = $('#div').position();

$.scrollTo(pos, 500);

});

Still, it doesn't work on FF! Worse, it threw exceptions:

[Exception... "Could not convert JavaScript argument arg 0 

[nsIDOMViewCSS.getComputedStyle]" nsresult: "0x80570009 

(NS_ERROR_XPC_BAD_CONVERT_JS)" 

location: "JS frame :: http://localhost:8888/scripts/jquery.js :: 

anonymous :: line 871" data: no]

WTH...

I googled around. These 2 links saved me.

http://www.west-wind.com/Weblog/posts/486155.aspx

Ok. I'm not crazy. This problem is a known problem. Position() returns a value properly only if the 

element is visible.

http://www.jnorton.co.uk/blog/jquery/jquery-check-if-all-content-has-been-loaded

Ahhhh, I should try doing this AFTER my element is loaded on the page.

$(window).load(function() { 

$.scrollTo($('#div1'),500); });

This works!

Alright, let's try one more thing. I put the following snipplet in $(document).ready() function.

$('#div1').load(function() { 

$.scrollTo($('#div1'),500); });

It doesn't work.  Oh well,   the documentation explains it.

"When bound to the window element, the event fires when the user agent finishes loading all content within a document, including window, frames, objects and images. For elements, it fires when the target element and all of its content has finished loading. Note: load will work only if you set it before the element has completely loaded, if you set it after that nothing will happen. This doesn't happen in $(document).ready(), which jQuery handles it to work as expected, also when setting it after the DOM has loaded."

I will just stick to what works :)