database driver

FORMCYCLE does not ship with any database driver anymore. This allows you to use different drivers and driver versions. However, you must first install the appropriate driver for the database management system you are using. The driver are available from the official page of the respective database management system:

• Oracle MySQL (Platform Independent must be selected under Select Opterating System)
• OracleDB
• PostgreSQL
• SQLServer
• MariaDB

The installation procedure depends on the application server you are using. You can find instructions for Apache Tomcat here.

Collation / Encoding

A database lets you choose between different encodings (collation). For FORMCYCLE, we recommend you use a UTF-8 collation that is case-sensitive. Specifically, we recommend the collation:

utf8_bin

When you use a different collations such as utf8_general_ci (UTF-8, case insensitive), you may encounter issues as that collation does not distinguish between upper case and lower case letters.

Notes on MS SQL and Encoding

For the 2019 server version or higher the encoding Latin1_General_100_CI_AS_SC_UTF8 should be used. In earlier versions it is best to use the encoding Latin1_General_CI_AS

.

Notes on Oracle MySQL

Since version 8, Oracle MySQL does not recognize the timezone name Cest anymore. By default, the operating system transmit the timezone to the database. When it transmit that timezone name, the database connection cannot be established. In this case, you can specify the timezone explicitly via the Jdbc-Url:

jdbc:mysql://localhost/db?serverTimezone=Europe/London

Also, there are some circumstances when the character encoding is not recognized correctly. If that happens, you can pass the encoding via Jdbc-Url as well. For example, when using Unicode and the database setting connection collation was set to utf8_general_ci:

jdbc:mysql://localhost/db?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF-8

Using different database systems

It is also possible to use different database management systems such as HSQLDB, Derby, or Informix. This requires that you installed the corresponding database driver. Here is a list of the Jdbc-Url and driver class for some database management systems: