GeoServer Style referencing SQL Server data store

I have a SQL server (2012) based data store in GeoServer (version 2.6) . For better readability I created a spatial layer with a whitespace in a column (attribute) name.

Trying to use a style with the attribute "landslide code" reasults in an error.

org.geoserver.platform.ServiceException: The requested Style can not be used with this layer.  The style specifies an attribute of landslide code and the layer is some layername

The problem seems to be the whitespace in the attribute name. I tried to use the xml coding for whitespace , no success. I also tried to encapsulate the attribute name in square brackets [], which is the standard for sql server. Also no success.

How can I use attribute names with whitespaces in their names? SQL server allows this!