Local character sets and the HCL Compass data code page

The local character set (also referred to as the platform code page, OS code page, or operating system locale) is the character set of the system on which your HCL Compass application runs. It determines which characters the application can read and display by default.

You can select any of the locales listed in Locales associated with supported HCL Compass data code pages as your local character set using your operating system's configuration methods. There is no requirement that your local character set correspond to the data code page. So, for example, you could use a system with the Greek local character set (associated with Windows™ code page 1253) against a database set using a data code page of Cyrillic (1251). However, you must install fonts corresponding to your installation's HCL Compass data code page in order to work with HCL Compass data.

Note: Users can alter the effective local character set by changing the regional settings, installing additional fonts, and adding input method editors (IMEs) that support additional languages.

You can check the local character set on a Windows client by reviewing the Regional and Language Options settings from the Control Panel. You can check it on any Windows system where HCL Compass is installed by running the installutil lscodepage command.

To run the installutil lscodepage command:
  1. Open a command window.
  2. Run a command of this form:

    installutil lscodepage -dbset dbset_name compass_login compass_password

    For example:

    installutil lscodepage -dbset 7.0.0 admin_user admin_password

To ensure data integrity, the program verifies that all characters it sends to the HCL Compass databases are included in the HCL Compass data code page. It rejects any unsupported characters and reports them to the user. Therefore, regardless of the local character set, only characters contained in the HCL Compass data code page are stored in the schema repository and databases. The one exception concerns attachments made to records. An attachment may contain data in any format.