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Status Under review
Workspace Sterling B2B Integration SaaS
Categories Inflight
Created by Guest
Created on Jun 27, 2026

RELATED IDEAS

Enhance B2Bi SAAS Core components to support Special Characters to accept server responses which contains special characters.

Below are the existing situations:
•Currently B2Bi SAAS core components support only UTF-8 encoding.

New functionalities to be added: Below new functionalities to be added:
•Enable the B2Bi SAAS core components to accept non-English character and process it through the database

Functionalities to be Added:
•The EventDetail field contains a UTF-8 special character, the RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK (’, U+2019), in the text "Can’t find matched shipment". Unlike a standard ASCII apostrophe ('), which occupies 1 byte, this character requires 3 bytes when encoded in UTF-8.
•Although the application logic truncates EventDetail to 2,000 characters, the database column is defined as VARCHAR(2000 OCTETS), which imposes a limit of 2,000 bytes rather than 2,000 characters. Since the truncated value includes UTF-8 multi-byte characters, its total byte size exceeds the allowed 2,000-byte limit, resulting in a database insert failure.

  • Admin
    Manoj Panda
    Jul 22, 2026

    Hi Souradip,

    Thank you for submitting this idea and for the detailed technical write-up — it makes the problem very clear.

    You have identified a genuine character encoding boundary issue: the EventDetail column is defined as VARCHAR(2000 OCTETS), which enforces a byte limit rather than a character limit. When the field contains multi-byte UTF-8 characters — such as the RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK (U+2019, 3 bytes) — the application-level truncation to 2,000 characters can still produce a value that exceeds 2,000 bytes, causing the database insert to fail. This is a correctness problem, not just a cosmetic one, and it will surface for any non-ASCII content in that field.

    There are two complementary ways to address this, and we will evaluate both:

    1. Byte-aware truncation: Update the application logic to truncate EventDetail to 2,000 bytes (not characters) before the insert, ensuring the value always fits within the column definition regardless of the character set used.
    2. Schema alignment: Align the column definition with the intended semantic — either change the column to VARCHAR(2000 CHAR) (character-based limit) or increase the byte allocation to accommodate typical multi-byte content safely.

    The broader ask — ensuring B2Bi SaaS core components gracefully handle non-ASCII and multi-byte UTF-8 content end-to-end — is well-aligned with the direction we want to take the platform as our customer base becomes more globally distributed.

    We will bring this into our backlog review. I will update you here as it progresses. In the meantime, if you have a specific transaction or support case where this failure was observed, please share the reference — it will help us reproduce and scope the fix accurately.

    Thanks again for the thorough submission.

    Best regards,
    Manoj Panda
    Product Manager, Sterling B2B Integration SaaS
    IBM

    Reply

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