Special characters impacting the catalog group status

When special characters are used in the code attribute for catalog group, the status of the catalog group remains in an Open state even after successful export.

Symptoms

When special characters are used in the code attribute for catalog group, the status of the catalog group remains in an Open state even after successful export. The status field can be seen to be Open. On the WebSphere Commerce user interface, the group is seen correctly. In the scheduler default.log, the escaped characters can be seen in the SOAP response.

Causes

This issue occurs because the special characters in the code attribute for catalog group are sent correctly in the SOAP request but the SOAP response returns escaped hexadecimal format, which cannot be matched with the original identifier and the status is not correctly updated.

Environment

All environments with the Advanced Catalog Management solution installed.

Diagnosing the problem

The $TOP/logs/<service_name>/default.log file shows both SOAP request and response. You can see that the identifier tag value is mismatched.

Resolving the problem

To work around this issue, do not use accented, special, or language-specific characters in the code attribute for catalog groups.