Cannot change charset of MySQL database tables

Issue type:

[ ] question [X] bug report [ ] feature request [ ] documentation issue

Database system/driver:

[ ] cordova [ ] mongodb [ ] mssql [X] mysql / mariadb [ ] oracle [ ] postgres [ ] sqlite [ ] sqljs [ ] react-native

TypeORM version:

[X] latest [X] @next (tried both) [ ] 0.x.x (or put your version here)

Steps to reproduce or a small repository showing the problem:

Trying to solve another issue, I cannot seem to create a basic table in a database with a default charset of UTF8_GENERAL_CI (which I understood should be default, unless I got it wrong, which means the docs are blurry).

Here’s my connection:

createConnection({
    type: "mysql",
    host: process.env.DB_HOST,
    port: parseInt(process.env.DB_PORT || ''),
    username: process.env.DB_USERNAME,
    password: process.env.DB_PASSWORD,
    database: process.env.DB_NAME,
    synchronize: true,
    // Tried using 'extra' as saw in another issue. Also tried: 'utf8', 'utf8_general_ci', 'utf8mb4'
    charset: "UTF8_GENERAL_CI", 
    entities: [
        Family
    ]
}

Here’s my entity:

@Entity()
export class Family {

    @PrimaryGeneratedColumn()
    id: number;

    @Column({name: 'sCatName', type: "varchar", length: 50})
    nameHebrew: string;

    @Column({name: 'sCatNameEng', type: "varchar", length: 50})
    nameEnglish: string;
}

Here’s the result of the query SELECT * FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS WHERE TABLE_SCHEMA = 'arihav' AND TABLE_NAME = 'family';

TABLE_CATALOG	TABLE_SCHEMA	TABLE_NAME	COLUMN_NAME	ORDINAL_POSITION	COLUMN_DEFAULT	IS_NULLABLE	DATA_TYPE	CHARACTER_MAXIMUM_LENGTH	CHARACTER_OCTET_LENGTH	NUMERIC_PRECISION	NUMERIC_SCALE	DATETIME_PRECISION	CHARACTER_SET_NAME	COLLATION_NAME	COLUMN_TYPE	COLUMN_KEY	EXTRA	PRIVILEGES	COLUMN_COMMENT	GENERATION_EXPRESSION
def	arihav	family	id	1	NULL	NO	int	NULL	NULL	10	0	NULL	NULL	NULL	int(11)	PRI	auto_increment	select,insert,update,references		
def	arihav	family	sCatName	2	NULL	NO	varchar	50	50	NULL	NULL	NULL	latin1	latin1_swedish_ci	varchar(50)			select,insert,update,references		
def	arihav	family	sCatNameEng	3	NULL	NO	varchar	50	50	NULL	NULL	NULL	latin1	latin1_swedish_ci	varchar(50)			select,insert,update,references		

Note that the default is latin1 and not utf8

[dmythro]

I’ve seen as a workaround only specifying to each column, not even per @Entity(), which is pretty annoying:

@Column({
  charset: 'utf8',
  collation: 'utf8_general_ci',
})

[andyslack]

I had an issue storing emoji’s in my table and this advice above worked for me:

@Column({ charset: 'utf8mb4', collation: 'utf8mb4_unicode_ci', })

On the column I wanted to store the emoji

Then updating the column via SQL:

ALTER TABLE order_logs MODIFY message CHAR(255) CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;