Hello,

I need some advice.

My discussion board users are writing mostly in Hebrew.
I have recently moved my website to a web server in England but experiencing lots of language compatibility problems.
I had to manually scrip all the web wiz forum database tables onto my new SQL Server 2008 database because the import wizard broke the table structure by making some seeded columns regular columns. This was complicated enough. Halfway through the process I have noticed that in the Thread table 'Message' is stored as 'text'. As I do not have much access to my current database settings it is actually defined with a latin locale while my previous one was defined with a hebrew locale.
To be able to transfer all data properly I had to change the locale of the Message column to Hebrew (i do not have permissions to change the whole database locale). This way I was able to transfer all the hebrew data properly.

The problem is that each message's text appears on the forum_posts page with question marks instead the hebrew text. but this is the only value to appear like that! (I might have a similar issue with the PM_Message text as well). Everything else including user names, topic subjects, etc appear properly in Hebrew. I am using the right meta tag with windows-1255 and a code page equal to 1255 across the whole system.
Why is this happening and how can I sort that? I am in real need for help.

Thank you in advance.

Kind regards,
Noy.

I will note the values in the database are indeed stored in proper Hebrew as even though the column is of data type 'text' I defined the column to have a hebrew collation. The problem is only to do with how Thread.Message is displayed on the relevant page(s)

Hi Bruce,

Yes you are right. The import/export wizard is really no use. I have managed to solve this. Since my hosting company did not help me at all and I do not have permissions to restore my database I had to go through a very complex operation to solve this. What I had to is to script all tables and their primary and foreign keys. I had to do this in certain order. Then I built a SSIS solution with data flow tasks that pass the data. In the case of the PMMessage and Thread table I had to also do the following:

1) I created a new column with data type 'ntext' instead of the Message column which was of type 'text'. I had to delete the other column, rename the new one to the old one and then remove the keys, truncate the table and and the keys again.

2) I set this column's locale to Hebre locale.

3) In my SSIS package I created a data flow task that contains OLE DB source, data conversion transformation and OLE DB Destination -

* The data conversion converts the old 'text' column to format 'ntext'

* Both the OLE DB source and destination are defined with default code page of 1255 (represents Hebrew) in their properties. The OLE DB source is also defined to have the AlwaysUseDefaultCode as True.

Many other combinations I have tried caused the database to have either corrupted text, or actually even worse to have all the values in the database in proper Hebrew while on the website they did not appear correctly.

If I had permissions to restore my own database or if my hosting company would have agreed to do this for me all that work of literally days would be redundant...

Thank you for your reply,
Noy.