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| Products - System i |
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Evolution ²·º = Technological Innovation x Process Innovation |
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Unicode: |
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| Why a company needs Unicode: Single byte refers to a language environment for a certain character set. The character set 273 (EBCDIC) is always used here in Germany. But what if a German company also needs to be able to deal with e.g. Czech characters (character set 870 EBCDIC)? Depending on the use case, the CCSID of the file and the display unit would have to be adjusted accordingly. Yet if both German and Czech datasets have to be processed within one single file, you’re going to run into problems displaying them. The user cannot have these data simultaneously displayed in the correct form within one display session. Also, the data for both countries’ character sets are not properly stored in the shared database. This is where the Unicode character set can help. Whether you choose UTF-8 or UTF-16 is irrelevant. |
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| Now the data will be stored in a normalized form (Unicode) in the database. Because the i5 terminals (5250 data stream) can’t deal with Unicode data, they are automatically reconverted to EBCDIC, which is why the user subsequently automatically loses data again. In practice, this only then becomes problematic when a user wants to simultaneously display both Latin1 (German characters) and Latin2 (Czech characters) or, for example, if a German users wants to modify data from a Czech editor. The user would lose contents in this case, or even generate junk data. And if even more different character sets have to be administered (Asian double-byte characters, Greek, Cyrillic etc.), this is nearly impossible with today’s usual method. |
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| With the Server Builder 400 technology and corresponding Unicode extension, the Unicode data stream made available by the application can now be correctly processed in the frontend. Unicode data are then sent directly to the frontend without having to be reconverted to EBCDIC or ASCII. |
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| Screenshot 5250 German |
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| Screenshot 5250 Czech |
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| Screenshot PKS SB400 with Unicode as Windows frontend |
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| Screenshot PKS SB400 with Unicode as web frontend |
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Success = Stability x Evolution ²·º |
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