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About the Transcode Service Business Service

This topic is part of About Integration Considerations.

To supplement the character conversion performed by Siebel EAI components, Siebel Business Applications offer the Transcode Service business service. You can use methods of this business service in your workflow processes to validate and convert data from one character set encoding to another.

For information about how business services handle character conversion errors, see About Character Conversion Errors.

The Transcode Service business service supports two methods:

• Validate. This method confirms the input property set hierarchy or the value of the input property set. You can use this method to check that a character is valid within a particular character set before proceeding, without actually performing the conversion. The Validate method is described in Table 6.

  Table 6. Arguments for Validate Method

  Method Argument	Required	Description
  ValidationMode	Yes	If set to value, then only the value is validated. Otherwise, the properties are validated for the entire hierarchy.
  TargetEncoding	Yes	For the proper language-independent code parameter values, see Siebel System Requirements and Supported Platforms on Siebel SupportWeb.
  SourceEncoding	No	This argument is required when ValidationMode is set to value and the input value contains binary data. Conversion from binary data in SourceEncoding to binary data in TargetEncoding is implied. For the proper language-independent code parameter values, see Siebel System Requirements and Supported Platforms on Siebel SupportWeb.

• Convert. This method converts the value in the input property set to the target encoding in the output. You use this method when data is entering or leaving Siebel applications, and a conversion is required now, so that the next software component in the processing chain can recognize the data. The Convert method is described in Table 7.

  Table 7. Arguments for Convert Method

  Method Argument	Required	Description
  ConversionMode	Yes	Values can be StringToEncoding, EncodingToString, or EncodingToEncoding.
  TargetEncoding	Yes	Required for StringToEncoding and EncodingToEncoding modes. For the proper language-independent code parameter values, see Siebel System Requirements and Supported Platforms on Siebel SupportWeb.
  SourceEncoding	No	Required for EncodingToString and EncodingToEncoding modes. For the proper language-independent code parameter values, see Siebel System Requirements and Supported Platforms on Siebel SupportWeb.

  NOTE:  To ignore character conversion errors (invalid character errors or substitution errors) for the Convert method, specify IgnoreConversionErrors = TRUE as a method argument. Otherwise, do not use this argument. (This argument is hidden in Siebel Tools.)