Hi All,
Qantas currently has an open issue with IFS for Job Card Steps with “special” characters causing HTML formatting on the Task Card report to fail. This can also cause job card steps to appear to have been edited when using show differences however it is not apparent to the task writer what has been changed.
It looks like it is caused by some character encoding conversion when a task is revised. This is only an issue since we moved to 8.3SP5, possibly related to the data type change of the step_ldesc to CLOB. Generally this is caused when content is copied from an MS office application that has tried to be helpful and replace a " with a “. When the task is revised, this character is replaced with a space and an ascii DC3 character(0x19). Its these control characters that cause the Jasper reports to stop trying to apply the formatting correctly.
We’re interested to learn if other operators, especially those with languages that use characters not in the latin-1 character set, have experienced this issue and what controls or fixes you have implemented to address it.
Unicode characters in Job Card Steps
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We use a variety of tools, but in our Data migration process we used Alteryx workflows and had a macro from the Alteryx Community called ASCIIFY (INFO) which uses a find-replace from a table of unicode characters and replaces them with the correct ascii equivalent un UTF-8 format. It also refers to some open-source tables that can be used to support the find-replace work.
There might be some options to help you if you start there. I know in our case the quote/double quote was one of the things we used ASCIIFY for.
Good luck!
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Thanks TIm.
The AnyAscii that was ASCIIFY was built on may be my new favourite thing!
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Hi,
IFS has also offered a trigger-based solution to Qantas that will check when a job card step is being added. If the step includes specific characters they will be replaced (i.e. “ will be placed with ").
Regards,
Josh
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