[Openinteract-dev] Small i18n issue

[Kutter M. <mar...@si...>]

Hi * !

I ran into a small internationalization issue, today. 
I'm running a OI2 site with SPOPS::LDAP as backend. On storing non-ASCII
characters in the LDAP directory server, this complains that properties with
non-ASCII-characters have an "invalid syntax".

I've been able to track this down to a charset problem. 
LDAP expects directoryString attributes to be in UTF-8 encoding. The
perl-ldap interface (Net::LDAP) does not provide UTF-8 conversions by
default, so these are to be done by the application using Net::LDAP. This is
no big deal - just a 

 use Encode;
 $value = decode($charset, $value);

for all the fields to set - but one needs to know the request's charset.

The charset used in the HTTP request is specified by the "charset" attribute
in the Content-Type header. 

Example:

Content-Type: multipart/formdata; boundary="--------------12345";
charset="EUC-JP"

The default is "iso-8859-1" if no charset is supplied. 

The problem is, that the only available solution to get the charset used in
the request is to grab it from the underlying Apache::Request or
CGI::Request handle - not really easy and not really portable:

 my $contentHeader = CTX->request->apache->headers_in()->{ Content-Type };

As different charsets in HTTP requests are very likely to happen in i18n'ed
environments, and the problem is very likely to occur in non-LDAP
environments, too, I would suggest an extension to the
OpenInteract2::Request class, that provides access to the Content-Type HTTP
header, like it already does with some other header fields.

Maybe even a more general approach - exposing all HTTP headers in the
request object - could be suitable: This would remove the need to react on
additional HTTP headers by code changes forever.

Regards,

Martin Kutter