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Platform

The platform determines what data can be processed in a Siebel deployment. The character set encoding and operating system language of a platform will determine what data can be handled correctly and what data will not be handled correctly by the platform.

This document uses the term platform in several places to discuss deployment options as well as specific functionality available in Siebel Business Applications.

Siebel Business Applications generally do not support mixed character encoding environments. The reason is that it is not technically possible to manage an environment that uses multiple character set encodings on databases and servers without a genuine risk of losing data in the process.

For example, suppose a database is set up with a Western European character set encoding and a user tries to insert Japanese data through a Siebel Server set up for Japanese. Depending on the actual database, the effect could be that the user's data would be rejected and not stored in the database, or the data could get converted by the database and stored incorrectly as unreadable characters (substitution characters), resulting in loss of the original Japanese data.

In some cases a user may try to enter data into the application and receive an error message saying that the language of the text entered "is not compatible with the database language" or that the length of the text entered "is bigger than the corresponding length allocated in the database."

The above error may occur when the character set of the data does not match the character set of the database, and cannot be converted without data loss. Or, the error may occur when the data string is too long to fit into the database column.

Verify that your database is set up for Unicode, if you are using Unicode. Also check that all extension columns are large enough to accept characters larger than one byte in length. For example, in UTF-8 (supported on Oracle databases), accented characters use two bytes, so extension columns must be sized to be able to include such characters.

NOTE:  If your database uses Code Page 932 (or 936 on DB2, or JA16SJIS on Oracle), it is strongly recommended to set the parameter UseANSIControlsForCP to CP932 in the [SWE] section of the configuration file (such as uagent.cfg for Siebel Call Center). If you do not set the parameter in this way, users may sometimes be able to enter more text in a field than will be saved in the database. This parameter applies only for high-interactivity clients. It is assumed that the client machine uses the same code page as the database.