I had a problem when I created document/folder name in Alfresco Share that included Polish characters, e.g., ą, ę, ł, ż, ź. The Polish characters at first were rendered correctly but in the database (MySQL) they were saved wrong, which means that ? character was put instead of Polish letters. To make it more confusing the names were rendered wrong not necessary straight away but for example after server restart. Such behaviour implies that there had to be a communication issue between Alfresco and database and the data were saved using wrong encoding in the database. Alfresco application had file names saved in cache so it did not use the database to obtain their names. When server was restarted the data were read from the database and ? were shown. Unfortunately having ? characters caused problems to read for example folder content.

The solution to this issue was to change default encoding in the database to UTF-8. In MySQL it can be done in configuration file (/etc/mysql/my.cnf on Ubuntu). The following lines should be added to the appropriate sections in configuration file.

[mysqld]

...
collation-server=utf8_unicode_ci
character-set-server=utf8

[mysql]

...
default-character-set=utf8

After logging to MySQL and running status command the following information regarding encoding should be shown:

Server characterset:	utf8
Db     characterset:	utf8
Client characterset:	utf8
Conn.  characterset:	utf8