Case-sensitive string operations are those that consider upper and lower case as different letters. Operations that affect strings in queries (for instance, inside an XPath constraint) can be case sensitive or case insensitive depending on the database vendor, version, and configuration used by the Mendix application.
It is also important to note that each implementation of a case-insensitive operation may treat the case normalization of letters differently. As a general rule, normalization is based on locale. This is either specified explicitly in the database/table, or the database infers it from the Operating System. This normalization of letters, or case folding, is further described in Case Folding on the World Wide Web Consortium wiki.
For the purposes of this document we can divide case sensitive operations into three categories:
- Sorting: Indicates the order in which you want objects to be retrieved (alphabetically ascending or descending).
- Comparing: These are operations that involve equality or other comparisons directly in queries (for instance, in the query
\\Entity[Attribute = 'a'])
- String functions: These are the contains, starts-with, and ends-with functions of an XPath.
Unless otherwise indicated below, sorting and comparing strings is case sensitive whereas string functions are case insensitive. This is affected by the database, table, or column collation, and sometimes by other database specific options. The available collations and options are vendor (and sometimes version) specific.
2 Behavior of Case Sensitivity by Database Type
The following section describes the default behavior of the databases supported by Mendix.
Case insensitive for sorting, comparing, and string functions.
Sorting and comparison are case sensitive. They cannot be configured.
String functions are case insensitive as they are implemented using the
ILIKE SQL operator.
As of version 8.14.0, sorting and comparing are case sensitive. For versions below 8.14, all operations are case sensitive. There is an exception for both version groups where collation is configured to case insensitive, which affects all operations. For more information, see the Making DB2 Case-Insensitive section of DB2.
Does not support sorting on string attributes of unlimited length.
2.4 MARIADB & MYSQL
All operations depend on the configured collation.
The default collation is
utf8_general_ci when the
utf8 character set is used, or
latin1_swedish_ci when the
latin1 character set is used.
These default collations are both case insensitive.
Sorting and comparison depend on the configured collation.
The default collation is
binary, which is case sensitive, but a
binary_ci is available for case insensitive operations.
It is possible to set different collations for sorting and comparison operations by setting different values to the
NLS_COMP “Linguistic Sort Parameters”.
Does not support comparison on string attributes of unlimited length.
String functions are implemented by converting all letters to uppercase using the database’s
UPPER function and are, therefore, case insensitive and insensitive to the
locale in which they are executed.
2.6 SAP HANA
Does not support sorting or comparison on string attributes of unlimited length.
2.7 SQL SERVER
All operations depend on collation.
The default recommended collation is
For more information, see our guide on Setting Up a new SQL Server Database and the Microsoft documentation Windows Collation Name.
3 Overview of Default Case Sensitivity
This table presents the default case sensitivity by different database types:
|Database Type||Comparison||Sorting||String functions|
|MARIADB & MYSQL||C||C||C|
Where the letters have the following meaning:
- S – Case sensitive
- C – Collation/configuration dependent
- I – Case insensitive
¹Operation not supported on strings of unlimited length. ²From Mendix version 8.11.0 ³From Mendix version 8.14.0