Deployment failed on component links with &

Question

Deployer failing when have link to component when title contains ampersand &. Here is transaction state snippet:

<Step state="Failed" start="2014-05-19T14:47:30.131+02:00" type="Deploying" href="simple" end="2014-05-19T14:47:51.642+02:00">
            <RemoteEndpoint windowSize="0" state="Success" start="2014-05-19T14:47:30.131+02:00" processor="17952@Server1" name="Server1" id="vWhlAAt41vghWJmofbqqTg==" end="2014-05-19T14:47:30.831+02:00" connector="HTTPS"/>
            <RemoteEndpoint windowSize="0" state="Failed" start="2014-05-19T14:47:51.633+02:00" processor="26272@Server2" name="Server2" id="lysk3w7pFGLK35rpZaa0Jg==" end="2014-05-19T14:47:51.642+02:00" connector="HTTPS">
                <Message>Phase: Deployment Processing Phase failed, Could not transform tcdl file Path/tcm_0-522524-66560.PathToJSPPage.jsp, Could not transform tcdl input string  Unable to transform input string, Illegal entity in attribute value  title=&amp;quot;Mobilt Bred&amp;&amp;b毤 M&amp;quot; xlink:title=&amp;quot;Mobilt Bredb毤 M&amp;quot; xmlns:xlink=&amp;quot;http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink&amp;quot; Source (3801) :&lt;tcdl:Link type="Component" origin="tcm:57-248006-64" destination="tcm:57-221379" templateURI="tcm:0-0-0" linkAttributes=" title=&amp;quot;Mobilt Bred&amp;&amp;b毤 M&amp;quot; xlink:title=&amp;quot;Mobilt Bredb毤 M&amp;quot; xmlns:xlink=&amp;quot;http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink&amp;quot;" textOnFail="true" addAnchor="false" variantId=""&gt; </Message>
            </RemoteEndpoint>
        </Step>

I want to mention that everything works for components without & character in title. Can this anyhow be related to particular server settings since I am seeing that deployment success on one server instance? Does exist any other solution than replacing & in title.

Answer 1

The issue resides on wrong code in templating. In code that handles RTF it was being replaced encoded instances with not encoded one. After that this causing invalid values for linkresolver and deployer. That's being reason for deployer complains about invalid characters in xml attribute. Nothing related with deployer neither resolver. To summarize always take care and concentrate on what you produce in order to avoid spending large amount of time investigating and trying to find a bug in a wrong place.