The ?, ?? problem

Examples:

Troubleshooting/Research

I did some digging on the initial case in UVC, and confirmed that the name change was concurrent with the submission of the Offsite Supervised Offsite Permission Form. Chinese characters (and anything else VARCHAR fields cannot handle) are displayed in Slate as “?”, with each character of Chinese getting its own question mark, so the question becomes exactly how the person record was changed by the submission of an application-scoped form. I was able to replicate the behavior using the browser Inspect tool to change the sys-first and sys-last names form values, so I suspect that there is a translation plug-in or web overlay of some sort that can do this.

The second case was in GSBS, with a student whose initial application was “lost”.

Resolution Steps

In any case, there are several ways to avoid this issue. The easiest is to remove the read-only student name fields from the form; they appear in the header, so are redundant in the form itself. If it is important to have them, using merge fields rather than read-only fields will prevent data access. The least invasive method is probably to build submission conditions on the form itself, so if anyone does enter characters that will blow up SIS, the form cannot be submitted: