Inconsistent CMIS Query Results? It’s not You, It’s your Locale.

A simple CMIS query like:

SELECT D.* FROM cmis:document AS D WHERE D.cmis:name LIKE '%Flower%' OR D.cmis:contentStreamFileName LIKE '%Flower%'

was giving me a fit lately, not working at all in RightsPro‘s CMIS plugin which uses OpenCMIS and yielding inconsistent results in CMIS Workbench where re-posting the same query ten times would give the expected result maybe half the time.

Thanks to Florian Müller and this post, it seems as though Alfresco doesn’t always behave as expected when the locale is set in the CMIS session.

Removing the locale session parameters got things working in RightsPro, but I didn’t immediately see an easy way to change the locale in a Workbench session (the log shows that it’s using a default of en_US), and I still don’t know what’s up with the inconsistent results there, perhaps a coincidental caching issue.

This was all using OpenCMIS 0.3 against Alfresco Enterprise 3.3.1 over SSL.