Advantages of UTF-8 Encoding

TIBCO iProcess Suite’s support for UTF-8 (or UCS-2 in the case of SQL Server) enables you to work in an international environment and in a multi-national environment, using more than one multi-byte character set simultaneously.

This means that one TIBCO iProcess site can host multiple regions. For example, an enterprise operating globally could support data in Chinese, Japanese, Russian and English character sets in the same database. Work can be partitioned so that the users will see work in their language.

Note: In this diagrammatic example, you must ensure that users of the Japanese and Korean application do not receive each others' work items because the characters do not display correctly.

Native languages support is not possible without UTF-8 support because an iProcess Engine installation can support only one native character set. This option also simplifies using external UTF-8 applications. The conversions described in Globalization Support Using Native Encoding are not necessary if the iProcess Engine supports UTF-8.

An additional advantage of using UTF-8 is that WIS searches, which use wildcard characters, are also more consistent. For example, the expected results for filtering work items with the expression a?c would be items such as aac, abc, acc, and so on. However, searches are performed by a comparison of bytes, not characters, so actual results could include a, followed by a Japanese character that includes c in its byte representation, followed by c. This situation is avoided when the iProcess Engine uses UTF-8.