Globalization Support Using Native Encoding The following sections describe how an iProcess Suite installation that uses native encoding rather than UTF-8 encoding. This type of environment supports either of the following: • a single-byte native character encoding environment • a multi-byte native character encoding environment Some native multi-byte character sets are referred to as double-byte character sets (such as BIG-5 or Shift-JIS). Using iProcess Suite in a Single-Byte Native Encoding Environment The following diagram shows iProcess Suite in an international environment that uses a single-byte native character encoding environment (in this example, Latin-1). In this example: • When text is entered, in either Spanish or French, into the external applications, the data is encoded using UTF-8. UTF-8 is used to send the data from the external applications to the web server. • The web server converts the data from UTF-8 to Latin-1 and sends the data to iProcess Engine. • iProcess Engine inserts the data into the iProcess Database. • The iProcess Database stores the data as Latin-1. Note that: • iProcess Engine supports a variety of character sets as its native character encoding. However, iProcess Engine still needs to handle data in other encodings. Therefore, iProcess Engine provides the functionality to convert different character encodings into its native character encoding. • It does not matter if the machines hosting the iProcess Database, iProcess Engine, and iProcess Web Services Server and Client Plug-ins are all in separate locations to the machines hosting the external applications. Using iProcess Suite With a Multi-Byte Character Encoding Environment The following diagram shows the iProcess Suite in an environment that uses one multi-byte native character set. In this example: • When text is entered in Japanese into the external application the data is encoded using UTF-8. UTF-8 is used to send the data from the external application to the web server. • The web server converts the data from UTF-8 to Shift-JIS (native encoding) and sends the data to iProcess Engine. • The iProcess Engine inserts the data into the iProcess Database. • The iProcess Database stores the data as Shift-JIS (native encoding). Note that: • iProcess Engine supports a variety of character sets as its native character encoding. However, iProcess Engine still needs to handle data in other encodings. Therefore, iProcess Engine provides the functionality to convert different character encodings into its native character encoding. • It does not matter if the machines hosting the iProcess Database, iProcess Engine, and iProcess Web Services Server and Client Plug-ins are all in separate locations to the machines hosting the external applications. Implementing iProcess Suite in an International Environment with Native Encoding When implementing the iProcess Suite in an international environment, you need to consider the flow of data between the individual iProcess products that make up the iProcess Suite. Each iProcess product that needs to communicate with an external application needs to be configured to use the same character set as the external application. An overview of steps you need to follow is: 1. Identify which iProcess products you are using and the physical locations of those products. The components that require configuration for encoding are: − your host system locale − iProcess Engine database encoding − iProcess Email Plug-in − iProcess Workspace (Browser) − iProcess Technology Plug-ins − iProcess Web Services Plug-in − LDAPCONF Utility 2. On the machines that are hosting the iProcess product components, check that host system locales are using the correct character sets. 3. Set the encoding attributes for each component. Refer to the Installation or user guides supplied with each component for information on how to do this. 4. 4. Non-XML files (such as XFR or Abox files) are always converted from the encoding specified by the system locale. The environment variable SW_FILE_ENCODING does not work in native mode.