Weird characters in returned dataset

[Siegfried Glaser]

Hello everybody!

I recently wrote a VB.Net webservice that retrieves some survey data from an
oracle server and returns it as a strongly typed dataset. For some weeks
everything worked fine but all of a sudden my customer claimed that my
application ceased working after he had added some new survey data to the
oracle database.
I asked him to test the webservice with his browser and we found out that
some of the data was replaced by characters that pretty much looked like they
where chinese.

What I've already tried:
- I fetched me a dump of my users data and tested my application in my
development environment. Everything worked just fine although the data was
now the same on both machines.
- We executed the SQL-statements that are used to fill the dataset directly
at my customers oracle-server using TOAD and there where no strange
characters.
- We varied which of the surveys where returned in the dataset. With some
combinations it worked, with others it didn't but I wasn't able to find a
system to predict whether a combination would or would not cause an error.
- I've tried searching the web vor answers but it seems I'm alone with my
problem. :(

I'm pretty new to all this webservice stuff, so I'd appreciate any help you
can give me. I'm really at my wits' end.
thanks in advance
Sigi

[Siegfried Glaser]

I was able to coax my customer into a little further investigation concerning
the settings of his oracle-server. I'm still not sure where the problem was,
but my customer thinks he can solve it by himself now. ;)

Sigi