All my forms are inaccessible after update

Hi, thanks for the akeeba backup.Here is what I found out.

There is an sql-Error while trying to load the form record set from the data base, due to a bad configuration of your database
The error message is: Illegal mix of collations (utf8mb4_general_ci,IMPLICIT) and (utf8mb4_unicode_ci,IMPLICIT) for operation '='Usually Joomla! and Visforms themselves handle the correct database setting.
If the database driver used has UTF8MB4 support, the Joomla standard requires a changed character encoding to utf8mb4_general_ci
Visforms installation and update implement this change regarding the Visforms data tables.
As in your database there is a mix of collations, I must assume, that somebody has made incompatible changes "manually" i.e. using the akeebe admin tools.The collations of all tables have to be compatible with each other.Because of the SQL-Error the form records are no longer loaded from the database and cannot be displayed.

Regards,
Aicha

Hatte das genau gleiche Problem, jetzt läuft alles wieder OKAY mit dem Umstellen der Kollation
Vielen Dank für die Lösung!
mit Gruss

So, I've gone back into Admin tools and changed the collation to UTF-8 multibyte (which is the recommended setting) and my forms are back!

Question: What is the collation set at "natively"?  What was it before it changed?
I'd like to put it back that way so this doesn't keep happening.

Thank you very much for all your help. THAT is not something I would have figured out.
 

Hi,
it was quite a while ago, that I have implemented the code which handles the utf8mb4 support modifications that came with Joomla!
So I had to take a look into the code.
If a mysql database does have utf8mb4 support Joomla! and Visforms will set the characterset to utf8mb4 and the collation to utf8mb4_unicode_ci.
But there is one exception, the Joomla! finder tables (any table with "finder" in the table name").
Joomla! will set the collation of these tables to utf8mb4_general_ci.
The characterset is utf8mb4.
So actually the finder is a world of it's own and the finder tables cannot be linked to anything outside the finder.

Please note that making changes to the database definition settings can easily render the database useless and broken.

Regards,
Aicha

Thank you very much for the explanation.
I have something that works now.

I don't want to optimize myself into a box.

Let's hope Joomla 4 is REALLY around the corner!