International Character Set Translation

Not all computer systems treat text data the same. Systems around the world have different character sets and sending text data from one country to another may not yield expected results. As well, different database products treat this problem differently.

HCL Enterprise Integrator (HEI) and Domino® Enterprise Connection Services (DECS) support international character sets and support over 200 different character set mappings, including US English, Asian, Far East, and Western and Eastern European languages, as well as multi-lingual characters sets such as LMBCS and Unicode. HEI provides support for translating characters from one set to another.

All text data within HEI and DECS maintains a reference to its own character set. This reference is determined automatically by the connector when the data is fetched from a database. If the data is inserted into a database with a different character set, HEI and DECS automatically translates the text data just prior to storing it. This process maintains maximum performance by eliminating any unnecessary translation.

Performance may be further enhanced through three levels of translation support. The translation support choices are described as follows:

  • Disabled -- For maximum performance and when all text data is in compatible character sets, translation is disabled completely.
  • LMBCS only -- Only Notes® text data is translated. This is appropriate when all non-Notes text data is in compatible character sets.
  • Enabled -- Translation between different character sets always occurs.

Regardless of the setting, Unicode text is always translated.

Note: In HEI, the text translation setting is available for each HEI server, allowing different servers to have different levels of support. The translation support level is set during the installation of an HEI server. It may also be viewed and edited in the server configuration document in the HEI Administrator. In DECS, the text translation setting is controlled by the notes.ini file, see "Forcing HEI or DECS to Use a Character Set as Native" in this chapter.