Unicode Support on the WebFOCUS Reporting Server

The WebFOCUS Reporting Server supports a Unicode Transformation Format (UTF) called UTF-8 in ASCII environments, and UTF-EBCDIC in EBCDIC environments:

• For ASCII, the UTF-8 encoding standard assigns each character of each language a code that can be from one to three bytes long. The codes assigned to European characters are one or two bytes long, Middle Eastern characters are two bytes long, and those assigned to Asian characters are three bytes long. This standard is compatible with ASCII format because the first 128 UTF-8 codes have the same one-byte representation as the corresponding ASCII codes.
• For EBCDIC, the UTF-EBCDIC encoding standard assigns each character a code that can be from one to four bytes long. EBCDIC characters, including C1 control characters, have the same one-byte representation in UTF-EBCDIC.

In non-Unicode, single-byte encoding standards, such as ASCII, each character is assigned a code that is one byte long, limiting the number of characters that can be represented by the standard. When using those standards, it became common to equate a character with a byte of storage. If you had a string of 10 characters, the amount of storage needed was 10 bytes, and many character manipulation routines expected character string lengths to be specified as a number of bytes.

With Unicode encoding, bytes and characters are no longer equated. Characters are represented internally by a varying number of bytes, depending on the character. If you configure the server for Unicode, you define the length of strings and alphanumeric fields in terms of characters, not bytes. This simplifies specifying string and field lengths. Each character is represented internally by up to three bytes, and the server automatically adjusts for the actual storage length. In reports, each character displays in a report column using one space, regardless of how many bytes it takes up in memory. This character-based processing mode employed for Unicode environments is called character semantics. The non-Unicode mode is called byte semantics.

Procedures will continue to work when deployed in a Unicode environment, without adjustment, in most cases.

The main benefit of the new system is the ability to have multiple languages (both European and Asian) in the following WebFOCUS and Dialogue Manager objects:

• Titles, descriptions, and names in synonyms.
• Headings and prompts in procedures.
• Data for all supported adapters (for example, SAP BW, SAP R/3-ECC, Oracle, Db2, Sybase ASE, Teradata, MySQL, Web Services, Fixed files). For more information, see Accessing Unicode Data.