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About Siebel EAI and Unicode Support

A multilingual company that includes divisions in different countries who use different languages can use Unicode to deploy a single instance of a Siebel application release. However, this technique presents a unique integration challenge because the other systems in the multilingual IT landscape for the company might or might not allow Unicode. Unicode deployment modes that address this issue include:

• Unicode Siebel Server with Unicode database
• Unicode Siebel Server with traditional code page database

For these deployment modes, integrating Siebel Business Applications with an external application might involve data replication, data sharing, or both data replication and data sharing. If the code page database is used, and if the code page of the external system matches the code page of the Siebel Database, then data replication is allowed.

Exchanging Data Between Applications that use Different Code Pages

If data is exchanged between applications that use different code pages, then the numeric representation of the code point for each character must be converted from the standard that is used by the source code page, into the equivalent character that is used by the destination code page. This conversion requirement is true when a character is converted from:

• Unicode to a traditional code page. For example, UTF-16 to Shift-JS.
• A traditional code page to Unicode. For example, Shift-JS to UTF-8.
• One type of Unicode to another type of Unicode. For example, UTF-8 to UCS-2.

If there is no equivalent character in the destination code page, and if the conversion cannot be performed, then a conversion error is generated. Depending on the configuration, the conversion error might either terminate the current transaction, or the transaction might proceed by substituting replacement characters, as necessary, and ignoring the conversion error. For more information, see Transports and Interfaces: Siebel Enterprise Application Integration.

Figure 4 illustrates how Siebel EAI supports different adapters, such as COM and MQSeries, to integrate with an external application. Abilities inherent with each of these adapters include:

• Work with the character encoding, as specified in the picklist
• Perform conversion to or from the external encoding
• Handle conversion errors

Figure 4. Unicode Conversion

COM and Java Bean Unicode Protocols

COM and Java Bean are Unicode protocols. The sender and the recipient are responsible for converting the character sets. For example, because interfaces for a Siebel application automatically handle the conversion, these protocols are not required to perform a conversion. Error handling is handled differently by these protocols when compared to the other adapters.

Character Set Encoding

Siebel EAI components and adapters support code page conversion and allow you to specify how to handle a conversion error. The business services in which the Character Set Conversion for the Text Data argument is available include:

• EAI MQSeries Server Transport
• EAI DLL Transport
• EAI File Transport
• EAI HTTP Transport
• EAI MSMQ Transport
• EAI XML Converter
• EAI JMS Business Service
• Transcode

If one of these business services is called from a workflow process, then the valid set of encodings is controlled by a picklist. However, if the business service is called through a script or other similar mechanism, then the character set name is supplied textually. For example, if the Siebel application communicates with an external system through the EAI MQSeries Server Transport business service, then the called of EAI MQSeries Server Transport to send or receive a message also specifies the character set that the external system sends or expects to receive.

Target character encoding choices include:

• None
• UTF-8 Unicode
• UTF-16 Unicode
• Traditional Code page

For more information, see Siebel Global Deployment Guide.