Bad characters encoding in RCDCs

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It was rather long time since last blog post. Changes in professional life, TEC US (it was a blast – You can watch one of my sessions on YouTube – sorry for sound quality), projects … now trying to get back on track with my community work. So hopefully more entries here will be posted soon.

Today just a quick tip for something I was struggling with recently and there is pretty good chance that someone else will have the same problem.

Well – in Europe we have many languages and with this culture legacy we have also something more – diacritic characters in our alphabets. Of course this isn’t specific only to Europe – diacritic characters are present in many alphabets.

If You are working with FIM you have to live with RCDCs (RCDCs are definitions of how FIM UI is being rendered for particular types of objects). If you will start with editing RCDC downloaded from FIM (editing default one or creating new for new object type) maybe You want to put there some caption in your local language – like “Członkostwo w grupach” (which will translate to “Group membership”).  When such RCDC will get uploaded to FIM (iisrestart goodness) You may see that Your carefully crafted RCDC is broken and all diacritic characters are replaced with “something”.

If You want to make sure that this won’t happen ensure that your editing tool of choice saves RCDC XML as Unicode UTF-8 with Signature.

In select Visual Studio: File-> Advanced Save Options and then proper option.

Unfortunately next time You will download Your RCDC from FIM for editing You will have to remember about it as well. Another reason to keep RCDCs as part of Your solution outside of FIM.

BTW – it looks like I’m officially listed as a speaker for TEC Europe which takes places this October in Frankfurt, Germany. If You are interested in AD and IdAM or in hearing me speaking and You still don’t have plans for October maybe attending TEC is good idea !