How to Configure Your System

I/O mechanisms in Express

Personal Express can use the following I/O mechanisms to transfer data to and from external data sources.

I/O	Description	External Data
File I/O	Express commands such as FILEREAD, INFILE	file
EIF operations	Express IMPORT and EXPORT commands	EIF file
XCA	XCA communications	partner session
SNAPI	SNAPI communications	Windows client
SQL	Express SQL command	RDBMS

Translation tables and I/O mechanisms

You can configure Personal Express to use a pair of translation tables for all single-byte data exchanged using a given I/O mechanism. The pair consists of one translation table for inbound data and one translation table for outbound data.

The translation table pairs for each I/O mechanism are specified in the following settings on the Locale tab of Express Configuration Manager.

I/O Mechanism	Translation Tables Specified in. . .
File I/O (FILEREAD, FILEPUT, INFILE, etc.)	DefaultFileTranslateTable
EIF operations (IMPORT, EXPORT)	DefaultEIFTranslateTable
XCA	DefaultXCATranslateTable
SNAPI	DefaultSNAPITranslateTable
SQL	DefaultSQLTranslateTable

Additionally, you can specify translation tables for upper- and lower-case letters in the DefaultCaseTranslateTable setting.

Note: With the single exception of the DefaultCharacterSet setting, all the settings on the Locale tab of Express Configuration Manager are for specifying single-byte character translation tables. The DefaultCharacterSet setting is for systems based on multi-byte characters only.

Building the tables

No translation tables are provided with Personal Express. You will need to design and build the translation tables required by the various client applications that will use Personal Express.

Once you have set up the tables and configured Personal Express to use them, the translation process will operate transparently to the end user.

Later in this chapter, you will find sample translation tables that you may adapt for your own purposes.

Procedure: Basic Steps

The general procedure for configuring Personal Express to support single-byte character translation is outlined below:

1. Determine how clients will use Personal Express.

2. Identify the internal character set being used by Personal Express.

3. Identify the external character set that will be generally used for each type of I/O activity.

4. Design a pair of translation tables for each type of I/O activity.

5. With a tool such as Administrator, use Express language commands to create the translation tables within express.db.

6. Identify the translation tables in the settings on the Locale tab of Express Configuration Manager.

7. Determine if clients will require additional tables (other than the defaults you have just created and specified).

8. Create additional tables as needed. Specify these tables with Express language commands in the client applications that will use them.

These steps are described in detail in the sections that follow.