Character data representation architecture design

To enable your application for a multilingual environment, avoid coding CCSID values directly in your DDS for physical files. When database sharing takes place, you need to define your files with the CCSID of the primary language or use Unicode.

• Avoid coding CCSID values directly in your DDS for physical files. When creating different physical files for different languages, change the CCSID for your job (using the CHGJOB command). Only one set of DDS source code needs to be maintained.

  Conversions between all CCSIDs might not make sense in all cases. For example, if you access a Greek database with a CCSID of 00875 from a German display station with a job CCSID of 00273, you see garbled data on your display.

  Countries outside the Latin-1 character set use character sets that include non-Latin characters. No meaningful conversion is possible between the non-Latin code points and the Latin code points. Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, and Turkish are SBCS languages with non-Latin characters.

• When database sharing takes place, define your files with the CCSID of the primary language being used. Make sure that all users have the CCSID of the language that they use defined in their user profile.