Fix non-unicode string values on objects

Originally, all of the objects used str() to specify string type
attributes. This prevents the use of unicode values. A previous
patch errantly updated the utility function without bumping all
of the affected objects' versions. This does that, and also
fixes the issue for bare str() attributes.

Change-Id: Iad83589d399309b95c32813a1a660a12e571066b
Closes-bug: 1221346
Merge "Fix non-unicode string values on objects"