Durable orchestration with special characters

[tragopogon]

We pass the HTTP trigger’s request to the durable orchestrator.
Inside this worker (Start-DurableOrchestration) the request is JSON encoded but forwarded (Invoke-RestMethod) without a charset, so we lose special characters (e.g.: äöüß) in the request.

azure-functions-powershell-worker/src/Modules/Microsoft.Azure.Functions.PowerShellWorker/Microsoft.Azure.Functions.PowerShellWorker.psm1

Line 132 in 4a1bcd5

$null = Invoke-RestMethod -Uri $Uri -Method 'POST' -ContentType 'application/json' -Body $Body

Please change the ContentType parameter to “application/json;charset=utf-8”.
See pull request: #931

To workaround we encode the request with base64 before passing it to Start-DurableOrchestration and decode the Context.Input in the orchestrator before invoking the durable activity. Do you see any negative impacts on the workaround?
Or are we doing it completely wrong and should pass the request in another way to the activity?

[davidmrdavid]

Hi @tragopogon, thanks for reaching out. This a scenario we had not considered before so thank you for pointing it out. I do think your workaround should be safe, and I would recommend continuing to use it. Given that changing encoding formats may cause unexpected consequences in a multi-component system like ours, I would like to wait before incorporating your PR (which I realize appreciate!) so that we can investigate if it's safe to merge.

In the meantime, I agree that manually encoding and decoding these special characters would be the recommended approach. Thank you!