Transitioning to UTF-8
Hi everyone,
Can any of you share with me how you navigated migrating your realm to UTF-8?
We've only had QB for 2 years, but apparently, UTF-8 wasn't enabled when we started. Over the past year...
Forum Discussion
Just thinking out loud, but if I were to approach this, I would probably use the API to loop through all my apps, and within each app, loop through all my tables, and just convert the string fields of each table to utf-8 on the fly before inserting back into the table. If you have someone on your team that's familiar with python or could hire someone for cheap, they could probably whip something up in an hour or two. Depends on how many tables you have and many records are in each, but the runtime for this could potentially be pretty quick.
Hi Tyler,
I think this is a great idea!
Here are all the Quickbase objects that may contain non-ascii 1252 characters we have located so far. Some of these cannot be modified via API.
Field values
Field names
Text-Multiple Choice (values even after the type has changed)
Report names
Report Descriptions
Personal Report names
Table names
Notification customized text
I wonder how the proposed script handles non-breaking spaces?
We have found the only way to locate and clear non-breaking spaces is to export to excel and then use ctrl+0160 in Find and Replace.
There is a lot of hand work but I would guess the process could potentially take care of a bulk of the problems.
I will add that in some cases we found we could remove the non-ascii value (double-spaces) while others we replaced the value (single-space). It is hard to know when programmatically to choose one over the other without visually confirming the change.
Lastly one fun filled example we used Quickbase Find/Replace to remove a non-ascii character that removed every space in the field value. A quick table restore put it back but it was a surprise to expect 200 fields (which is what the display said) to get updated and then watch as 200000 values were updated with no way to stop the process. In cases like this export/import is the most efficient.
Anyhow, we talked with Data Collaborative about why their tool in the QB Exchange doesn't replace and the response was it was too complex.
I'd be interested to try out a bulk removal tool if you have one, let me know and I'll give it a go. But keep in mind we are 4 Apps away from done and then hopefully we never look back.
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Jim Harrison
transparency = knowledge + understanding : The Scrum Dudes
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