Which database do you use?

Can you check the character set of the database and the tables?

I'm using Mysql

My database.yml :
production:
adapter: mysql
database: foreman
host: xxx
port:
username: xxx
password: xxx
encoding: utf8

• 1. row *******************
  Variable_name: character_set_database
  Value: latin1

• 1. row *******************
  Field: id
  Type: int(11)
  Collation: NULL
  Null: NO
  Key: PRI
  Default: NULL
  Extra: auto_increment
  Privileges: select,insert,update,references
  Comment:
• 2. row *******************
  Field: name
  Type: varchar(255)
  Collation: latin1_swedish_ci
  Null: YES
  Key:
  Default: NULL
  Extra:
  Privileges: select,insert,update,references
  Comment:
• 3. row *******************
  Field: template
  Type: text
  Collation: latin1_swedish_ci
  Null: YES
  Key:
  Default: NULL
  Extra:
  Privileges: select,insert,update,references
  Comment:
• 4. row *******************
  Field: snippet
  Type: tinyint(1)
  Collation: NULL
  Null: YES
  Key:
  Default: NULL
  Extra:
  Privileges: select,insert,update,references
  Comment:
• 5. row *******************
  Field: template_kind_id
  Type: int(11)
  Collation: NULL
  Null: YES
  Key:
  Default: NULL
  Extra:
  Privileges: select,insert,update,references
  Comment:
• 6. row *******************
  Field: created_at
  Type: datetime
  Collation: NULL
  Null: YES
  Key:
  Default: NULL
  Extra:
  Privileges: select,insert,update,references
  Comment:
• 7. row *******************
  Field: updated_at
  Type: datetime
  Collation: NULL
  Null: YES
  Key:
  Default: NULL
  Extra:
  Privileges: select,insert,update,references
  Comment:

I wish I could point to exactly what's wrong, but these errors in my experience are hard to debug. I'd suggest trying to make everything use UTF-8, which means updating the database, the tables and the columns in MySQL, they each have their own collation settings (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-syntax.html).

I never managed those database/tables by hand. It has always been managed with puppet/stored_config and foreman ActiveRecords.
Could that be done in a db:migrate task ?

Quite probably, yes. It'd be useful to know if it solves the problem first though.

We just realized that users with non asccii character in their name are
not able to use foreman anymore because foreman throw 500 error even on /hosts page.
Our users come from LDAP backend and I can't resave a user with non ascii character in fields.
If I try to save with é or è characters I get Last Name field 'is invalid'.
IMHO this is a big problem and for us Foreman does not support properly ruby1.9
if we have no configuration mistake.

Hello ,
I've got the same problem, any solutions ?

if you had this error due at an user's import from LDAP.
go in to your database and drop the users with non carcaters utf-8 on their name.

and next to this you can do this

First, to solve the error caused by MySQL I used this two articles :

http://www.dotkam.com/2008/09/14/configure-rails-and-mysql-to-support-utf-8/

http://www.rorra.com.ar/2010/07/30/rails-3-mysql-and-utf-8/

Second, to solve the file encoding problem I added these 2 lines in my config/environment.rb

Encoding.default_external = Encoding::UTF_8
Encoding.default_internal = Encoding::UTF_8

Hello,

I've got the same problem. Just upgraded my Squeeze to Wheezy and now I got some errors when I click on edit node.

Encoding::CompatibilityError
incompatible character encodings: UTF-8 and ASCII-8BIT
app/helpers/layout_helper.rb:108:in `block in selectable_f'
app/helpers/layout_helper.rb:132:in `block (2 levels) in field'
app/helpers/layout_helper.rb:131:in `block in field'
app/helpers/layout_helper.rb:124:in `field'
app/helpers/layout_helper.rb:107:in `selectable_f'
app/views/hosts/_form.html.erb:96:in `block (2 levels) in app_views_hosts_form_html_erb__2240670598635151677_66412540'
app/helpers/layout_helper.rb:211:in `form_for'
app/views/hosts/_form.html.erb:7:in `block in app_views_hosts_form_html_erb__2240670598635151677_66412540'
app/models/taxonomy.rb:55:in `block (2 levels) in as_taxonomy'
lib/foreman/thread_session.rb:140:in `as_location'
app/models/taxonomy.rb:54:in `block in as_taxonomy'
lib/foreman/thread_session.rb:105:in `as_org'
app/models/taxonomy.rb:53:in `as_taxonomy'
app/views/hosts/_form.html.erb:5:in `_app_views_hosts__form_html_erb__2240670598635151677_66412540'
app/views/hosts/edit.html.erb:7:in `_app_views_hosts_edit_html_erb___1719025858547709970_67454920'
lib/foreman/thread_session.rb:31:in `clear_thread'

Are they any solutions?