Selecting and Configuring Character Sets and Language Input and Output

This chapter provides overviews of character sets and selecting character sets and discusses how to:

• Select character sets.

• Validate field length.

• Use CJK ideographic characters in name character fields.

• Detect and convert characters.

Understanding Character Sets

This section discusses:

• Character sets.

• Common character sets.

• The Unicode standard.

• Non-Unicode character sets.

• Character sets in the PeopleSoft Pure Internet Architecture.

Character Sets

Before you install your PeopleSoft system you must select an appropriate character set for PeopleSoft client workstations, application servers, and database servers.

A character set, also known as a code page, is an ordered set of characters in which each character is mapped to a numeric index, called a codepoint. This codepoint stores character data in a computer system. Many hundreds of character sets exist. Some are international standards, maintained by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), some are country-specific standards, and others are specific to a particular computer system vendor. Given the number of separate computers that are involved in a typical PeopleSoft installation, it is likely that your system uses several different character sets.

Common Character Sets

Although there is general agreement on the content and arrangement of most character sets, especially those that are maintained by the ISO, many different names are used by vendors and software packages for similar or identical character sets. US-ASCII encodes the basic characters and symbols that are needed to write the English language. However, US-ASCII is limited to 127 characters and cannot represent many characters that are needed by Western European languages, such as French and German, let alone ideographic languages, such as Japanese and Chinese, in which each character represents a word or concept. Many character sets, however, include all US-ASCII characters in addition to their other characters.

The following table illustrates just a few common character sets that you are likely to encounter and some of the names that are used by different vendors to refer to them:

Some of these character sets, such as ISO 8859-1 and IBM CCSID 37, require only one byte to represent each character. For example, in ISO 8859-1, the hexadecimal number 61 represents the lowercase Latin letter a. However, larger character sets, such as Shift-JIS, may require more than one byte to represent each character.

The Unicode Standard

The most important consideration when dealing with character sets across a system is ensuring that all characters that you plan to represent within the PeopleSoft system exist in the character set that is used by each component of the system.

For example, if you plan to maintain Japanese characters in employee names, you must ensure that:

• The character set that is used by the database system includes Japanese characters.

• Each external system feeding into or out of the PeopleSoft system expects data in a character set that includes Japanese characters.

• Workstations and printers are installed with fonts that include those characters.

For example, the Japanese Shift-JIS character set contains Japanese and many US-ASCII characters; it is sufficient for encoding both English data and the primary characters that are required in Japanese. However, it does not include the accented Latin characters that are needed for French, German, and other languages, so it is not a suitable character set for implementations that encompass Western European countries.

Given the sample list of common character sets in the previous table and the number of languages that are required by a typical global PeopleSoft implementation, selecting a character set can be daunting, especially when you are planning to support a large list of languages.

To simplify this situation, an industry consortium of vendors devised a universal character standard: the Unicode standard. This internationally recognized character standard represents every character that is required to write virtually every written language. The Unicode standard was developed and is maintained by the Unicode Consortium in conjunction with ISO. This standard shares the character repertoire with ISO/IEC standard 10646: the Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set (UCS), also known as the Universal Character Set for short.

The PeopleSoft system uses Unicode throughout PeopleTools to simplify character handling. The PeopleSoft system allows the use of Unicode within PeopleSoft databases to enable you to maintain a single database with characters from virtually any language.

The Unicode standard and the ISO 10646 standard are available from their respective organizations.

See The Unicode Consortium: http://www.unicode.org

See International Organization for Standardization (ISO): http://www.iso.org

Unicode Encodings

Unicode defines a code space of more than one million code points (or characters). Unicode code points are referred to by writing “U+” followed by the hexadecimal number—for example, U+0000, U+0061, U+FFFF, U+10FFFF, and so on. To manage such a large repertoire of characters, Unicode defines multiple planes each comprising 65,533 code points, or character positions. Plane 0, covering the range of U+0000 to U+FFFF, is known as the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) and is generally sufficient for almost all modern languages. The other planes are intended to encode extended ideographic characters, archaic scripts, and other rarely used characters (such as advanced mathematical symbols). All characters from planes outside the BMP are known as supplementary characters.

PeopleTools supports the use of characters from the BMP only; supplementary characters are not supported by PeopleTools.

Several different Unicode encoding forms have been standardized based on two encoding methodologies. Unicode defines these two encoding methods: the Unicode Transformation Format (UTF), and UCS. An encoding maps the Unicode code points (or perhaps a subset of code points) to sequences of code values of some fixed size. In UTF encodings, the number in the encoding name indicates the number of bits per code value; in UCS encodings, the number indicates the number of bytes per code value.

Four common encodings of Unicode are widely used:

• UTF-32 — a 32-bit, fixed-width encoding; equivalent to UCS-4.

• UTF-16 — a 16-bit, variable-width encoding.

• UTF-8 — an 8-bit, variable-width encoding, which maximizes compatibility with ASCII.

• UCS-2 — a 2-byte, fixed-width encoding; a subset of UTF-16 supporting characters in the BMP only.

Other Unicode encodings—such as, CESU-8, Java’s Modified UTF-8, UTF-1, and others—have specific, and sometimes internal, applications and are not widely used for the interchange of information.

While the PeopleSoft system currently supports only the UTF-8 and UCS-2 encodings, the following table presents a brief comparison of all four common encodings:

Unicode Encoding Examples

This section includes Unicode encoding examples for the following characters:

The following table shows the hexadecimal representation of these characters in each of the four Unicode encodings:

See Also

Selecting Email Character Sets

Non-Unicode Character Sets

Although much of the PeopleSoft system runs by using Unicode, you can configure several components with a non-Unicode character set. When making these choices, you should understand the types of character sets other than Unicode that exist.

This section discusses:

• Single-byte character sets (SBCSs).

• Double-byte character sets (DBCSs).

Note. For the sake of terminology, some systems, such as Microsoft Windows, refer to two types of character sets: Unicode and ANSI. ANSI, in this context, refers to the American National Standards Institute, which maintains equivalent standards for many national and international standard character sets. Informally, ANSI character sets refer to non-Unicode character sets, which can be any international, national, or vendor standard character set, such as those that are discussed at the beginning of this chapter.

Single-Byte Character Sets

Most character sets use one byte to represent each character and are therefore known as SBCSs. These character sets are relatively simple and can represent up to 255 unique characters. Examples of SBCSs are ISO 8859-1 (Latin1), ISO 8859-2 (Latin2), Microsoft CP1252 (similar to Latin1, but vendor specific), and IBM CCSID 37.

Double-Byte Character Sets

DBCSs use one or two bytes to represent each character and are typically used for writing ideographic scripts, such as Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. Most DBCSs allow a mix of one-byte and two-byte characters, so you cannot assume an even-string byte length. Encoding with a mix of one- and two-byte characters is also known as variable-width encoding, and such a character set is sometimes referred to as a multi-byte character set (MBCS).

The PeopleSoft system supports two types of DBCSs:

• Nonshifting

• Shifting

The difference between these types of DBCSs is in the way in which the system determines whether a particular byte represents one character or is part of a two-byte character.

Character Sets in the PeopleSoft Pure Internet Architecture

PeopleSoft installations include multiple components, each of which must handle differing character sets.

PeopleSoft application servers and clients (for example, the PeopleTools development environment and PeopleSoft Pure Internet Architecture pages) use Unicode exclusively and do not rely on other character sets to represent and process data. However, depending on your environment, not all system components support Unicode-encoded data. Therefore, you might not be able to run all parts of your system in Unicode. For example, some database platforms and third-party products do not support Unicode. The following table illustrates support for Unicode in the PeopleSoft system.

Therefore, PeopleTools enables you to configure these system components to use other character sets:

• The PeopleSoft database.

  Not all database platforms support Unicode data storage.

• COBOL.

  The character set that is used for PeopleSoft COBOL processing must match the character set of the database. If you created a Unicode database for the PeopleSoft implementation, you must also run COBOL in Unicode.

• File input and output.

  All file operations in PeopleTools, including file layout objects, trace and log files, and file operations from Structured Query Report (SQR) programs can be performed in Unicode or any supported non-Unicode character set. This is useful in situations in which you must interface with an external system that does not support Unicode.

• Third-party products that are non-Unicode compliant.

  Some third-party products that are supported by PeopleTools do not yet support Unicode. In this case, PeopleTools converts application data to a specific, non-Unicode character set before communicating with these tools. Check the product documentation for your third-party application regarding Unicode compliance before determining how the application and the PeopleSoft system will interoperate.

When Unicode is not used for any of these types of operations or data storage, the PeopleSoft system transparently handles the conversion from Unicode to a non-Unicode character set. The non-Unicode character set that is used depends on several settings, which are discussed in detail later in this chapter.

The character sets that the PeopleSoft system supports are defined in the PSCHARSETS table. The following table lists these character sets and the names by which they may be referred to in PeopleSoft applications. You may need to know the correct character set name to use in several situations including:

• In PeopleCode programs for manipulating file layout objects.

• In the Unix/Linux application server configuration to determine the default, non-Unicode character set for log files, trace files, and operating system interfaces.

• When creating your database.

  Refer to your hardware and software requirements guide for details about the character sets that are supported for your database platform.

This PeopleBook also contains information about supported character set encodings for globalization when using SQR for PeopleSoft.

See SQR for PeopleSoft-Supported Character Set Encodings.

¹ To use certain Windows-31J (also known as Microsoft CP932) characters in incoming or outgoing email messages, you must complete additional configuration of your web server (incoming email) and application server or PeopleSoft Process Scheduler (outgoing email).

See Selecting Email Character Sets.

See Also

PeopleTools 8.51 Hardware and Software Requirements Guide

For more information and code charts for Microsoft code pages, visit http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/bb964654.aspx

For more information and code charts for Unicode, visit http://www.unicode.org

Selecting Character Sets

This section discuses how to:

• Select database character sets.

• Select application server character sets.

• Select and manage client workstation character sets.

• Select email character sets.

See Also

Understanding Character Sets

Selecting Database Character Sets

The primary character set decision that you must make when installing a PeopleSoft implementation is which character set to use for the database system. Ideally, all databases are encoded in Unicode; however, in some cases Unicode requires several bytes to represent each character when only one byte may be required in a non-Unicode character set. Therefore, the PeopleSoft system enables you to use certain non-Unicode character sets for the database.

By using a Unicode encoded database, you can maintain a single database with data in any combination of languages. A single PeopleSoft application server can serve multiple users connecting to the mixed-language database, regardless of the language or character set of those users’ client machines. The only restriction on a user’s ability to access mixed-language data is the capability of the user’s client workstation to interpret, display, and accept keyboard entry of the characters from the various languages.

Most language or region-specific non-Unicode character sets provide sufficient characters for only a few languages. If you create a non-Unicode database, you must ensure that all of the characters for all of the languages that you plan on using can be represented in the character set that you choose.

The following table lists whether a PeopleSoft language is supported in a Unicode or non-Unicode database character set:

Depending on the data that you store and how the database stores Unicode characters, a Unicode database can be significantly larger than a non-Unicode database. However, only the storage of character data is affected; the space that is required for non-character data, such as numbers and dates (which are stored by the database system as numbers), is not affected.

Depending on the database platform, you can use one of the four character set types (SBCS, nonshifting DBCS, shifting DBCS, or Unicode) when creating the database. However, the number of characters that you can store in each column is affected greatly by the type of character set that you choose for the database encoding.

See Also

The Unicode Standard

Non-Unicode Character Sets

PeopleTools 8.51 Hardware and Software Requirements Guide

PeopleTools 8.51 installation guide for your database platform

Your operating system and database guides

Selecting Application Server Character Sets

All data that is stored in memory and processed by the PeopleTools application server is held in Unicode. However, the application server allows files on the server (created through PeopleCode file layout objects) and log and trace files to be Unicode or non-Unicode. Although the PeopleSoft application server uses Unicode internally for all data processing, it can create these files in Unicode or in a non-Unicode character set.

Each PeopleSoft application server is configured with a default non-Unicode character set. If a file operation must create a non-Unicode file, this character set is used, unless another character set is explicitly specified in the file operation. For example, if you create a file layout object to write a non-Unicode file, but you don’t specify in which character set the file should be created, the default non-Unicode character set of the application server is used.

Microsoft Windows enables you to change the default character set of the system, although as installed, the default character set matches the default locale of the Microsoft Windows installation. To change the system default locale (and therefore the character set), on Microsoft Windows servers, use the Control Panel’s Regional Options menu. In the Language settings for the system section, click the Set Default button.

When running on Unix/Linux, the PeopleSoft application server enables you to specify the default non-Unicode character set in the application server’s configuration file, which you select by using the PSADMIN tool. Any valid PeopleSoft character set with a character set type of SBCS or nonshifting DBCS is a valid default non-Unicode character set for PeopleSoft application servers that run on Unix/Linux.

See Also

Character Sets in the PeopleSoft Pure Internet Architecture

Attachments with non-ASCII File Names

Selecting and Managing Client Workstation Character Sets

You must consider the client components of PeopleTools when you are planning your language strategy. The requirements for language support on client workstations are different, depending on whether you are using the PeopleSoft Pure Internet Architecture or the PeopleTools development tools for Microsoft Windows.

This section discusses:

• Character sets and fonts in the PeopleSoft Pure Internet Architecture.

• Fonts and the PeopleTools development environment.

• Input methods.

Character Sets and Fonts in the PeopleSoft Pure Internet Architecture

The PeopleSoft Pure Internet Architecture serves all HTML pages in the UTF-8 encoding of Unicode. This encoding is recognized automatically by the web browser, because the encoding of the page is announced in the HTTP header when the browser communicates with the web server. All browsers supported by PeopleTools can support UTF-8 encoded HTML pages.

However, the browser needs other components to correctly display and enter the vast array of characters that are available in Unicode. Specifically, you need appropriate fonts to display the various scripts in which you expect data to be maintained. In addition, you might need alternate keyboard layouts or, in the case of ideographic scripts such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, you need input method editors (IMEs) to convert sequences of keystrokes into ideographs. The requirement for alternate keyboard and IMEs is the same for both the PeopleSoft Pure Internet Architecture and the PeopleTools development environment.

Not all fonts contain a full repertoire of Unicode characters, because many fonts are tailored to address a specific list of languages and contain only the glyphs that are required by those languages. If you try to view Unicode data with a font that does not contain the appropriate characters for the displayed language, you will most likely see square boxes in place of the appropriate characters. The data has not been corrupted; there is just no glyph available in the current font for the character that the system is trying to display. For this reason, you may need to license or configure several fonts for a global PeopleSoft system.

The PeopleSoft Pure Internet Architecture includes a set of style sheets, defined with Application Designer, that determine the font that is used to display HTML pages. In some cases, the application data may contain characters that are not present in this font and that require a different font.

The Albany TrueType fonts shipped in the PS_HOME\fonts directory support all of the languages supported by the PeopleSoft system. Alternatively, you may need to obtain and configure fonts that contain the characters for the languages that you are planning to use, if your workstations are not already configured with these fonts. Obtain fonts from the following sources:

• Many Microsoft Windows and other operating system applications are packaged with Unicode fonts containing glyphs covering a large range of languages.

  Microsoft Office is packaged with several fonts containing a large portion of the characters in Unicode, including the Microsoft Sans Serif font. Use these fonts in the PeopleSoft Pure Internet Architecture by specifying them in the Application Designer style sheet definitions or by following the browser-specific instructions in this section.

• Many public domain fonts exist that contain a large character repertoire for use in web browsers. The unifont.org web site is one location to get additional information on public domain fonts.

  See http://www.unifont.org/fontguide/

• Several font foundries license fonts for individual or corporate use.

  Some of these foundries include Monotype, Bitstream, and Tiro Typeworks.

Depending on your browser, you can also download fonts from your browser’s manufacturer.

To enable the display of GB18030 characters, you can use either the SimSun-18030 font from Microsoft or the Albany fonts shipped in the PS_HOME\fonts directory. Both of these fonts have glyphs for the supported ranges of the GB18030 character set.

Fonts and the PeopleTools Development Environment

PeopleTools enables you to specify the font that is used for all graphical components for all PeopleTools modules that run on Windows, such as Application Designer. Use these methods to specify fonts:

• Configuration Manager font setting (Display tab)

  This setting affects the font that is used by all of the designer components of PeopleTools, including all of the text that is contained in the Microsoft Windows resource files

  See Translating PeopleTools.

  Changing this font setting may be necessary if your workstation’s default locale does not contain the characters that are used for the language that you are attempting to display or maintain. For example, if you are attempting to view Japanese characters on an English Microsoft Windows workstation, you can change the PeopleSoft Configuration Manager font setting to select a font that contains the characters for the language that you are trying to display.

  The Albany TrueType fonts shipped in PS_HOME\fonts directory support all of the languages supported by the PeopleSoft system.

  In addition, several fonts that are shipped with Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office, including Arial Unicode MS and Microsoft Sans Serif, contain a large number of glyphs covering most of the languages that are supported by the Unicode character set. Microsoft Windows can also be configured with fonts for most worldwide languages by selecting the required languages under the Regional Settings Control Panel menu.

• PeopleCode font

  The PeopleCode editor in Application Designer also enables you to select a font for character display in the editor’s window itself. This is useful if the PeopleCode programs that you are working on contain Unicode characters. To set the font in Application Designer, open the PeopleCode program, select Edit, Display Fonts and Color.

Input Methods

If users will enter translated data by using PeopleSoft Pure Internet Architecture or the PeopleTools development environment, you must ensure that an appropriate keyboard layout or input method editor is installed on the workstation.

Most alphabetic languages can be typed by using a relatively simple keyboard layout. Several specialized keyboard layouts exist for most languages; configure these keyboard layouts through your operating system. For example, a Spanish keyboard layout contains keys for the n-tilde character (ñ) and several other accented characters.

However, certain PeopleSoft hot keys do not work as expected on alternate, non-U.S. keyboard layouts. For example, Alt+', Alt+\, and Alt+/ do not produce the expected results on the AZERTY keyboard. This occurs because some keys on non-U.S. keyboards produce different key codes than the same key on a U.S. keyboard (also known as a QWERTY keyboard).

A solution to this problem can be found in the appendix.

See PeopleSoft Hot Keys Do Not Function As Expected on a non-U.S. Keyboard.

There are several ways of entering these characters by using a nonlocalized keyboard. Your operating system manual can help you use specialized keyboard layouts, such as the English international layout, which enables you to enter accented characters by using two keystrokes. The Microsoft web site contains information about keyboards that are supported by Microsoft Windows and instructions for installing and configuring Windows keyboard layouts.

Ideographic languages, such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, require the use of a front-end processor to intercept multiple keyboard strokes and transform them into an ideographic character. These are known as IMEs, and they must be installed on each workstation where you plan to enter the ideographic languages.

Most localized versions of operating systems for these languages come preconfigured with IMEs that are appropriate for the language that is supported by the operating system. But on systems where the default locale is not Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, you may need to configure or license an IME from a third-party vendor. The PeopleSoft Pure Internet Architecture supports any IME that is supported by your browser. The designer tools in Microsoft Windows support all standard Microsoft IMEs.

Selecting Email Character Sets

The PeopleSoft system supports UTF-8 for outgoing Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) email messages from PeopleTools application servers. In addition, the PeopleSoft system supports several additional encodings for outgoing email.

PeopleSoft application servers support the following for outgoing email:

• UTF-8 (default).

• ISO-2022-JP, Shift_JIS, EUC-JP (for Japanese).

• ISO-2022-KR, EUC-KR (for Korean).

• GBK, Big5, GB18030 (for Chinese).

Specifying Email Character Sets

You specify an email character set in the SMTPCharacterSet parameter in the application server configuration file, psappsrv.cfg. By default, the SMTPCharacterSet parameter is set to UTF-8.

Note. You should specify a value for the SMTPCharacterSet. If you do not specify a value for the parameter, email is sent as-is, with no encoding. Leave the parameter set to the default value of UTF-8 if you are not certain about which value to use.

For example, to use ISO-2022-JP encoding for outgoing SMTP mail, in the psappsrv.cfg file, set the SMTPCharacterSet parameter to ISO-2022-JP, as shown in the following example:

[SMTP Setting]
...
SMTPCharacterSet=ISO-2022-JP
SMTPEncodingDLL=blank

You can also write your own SMTPEncodingDLL modules, if necessary.

Using Extended Japanese Characters

To use certain Windows-31J (also known as Microsoft CP932) characters—specifically, NEC special characters, NEC-selected IBM extended characters, IBM extension characters, and user-defined characters—in incoming or outgoing email messages with the ISO-2022-JP Japanese character set, you must complete additional configuration of your web server (for incoming email) and application server or PeopleSoft Process Scheduler (for outgoing email).

For incoming email on the web server, the following JVM setting must be added to the JAVA_OPTIONS_WIN32 parameter in the setenv.cmd file:

SET JAVA_OPTIONS_WIN32=
"-Dsun.nio.cs.map=x-windows-iso2022jp/ISO-2022-JP"

For outgoing email on the application server or PeopleSoft Process Scheduler, the following JVM option must be added to either the psappsrv.cfg file or the psprcs.cfg file depending on whether the application server or an AE program, respectively, will be handling outgoing email messages. JVM options are set in the PSTOOLS section of the file:

[PSTOOLS]
...
JavaVM Options=-Dsun.nio.cs.map=x-windows-iso2022jp/ISO-2022-JP

In addition, your web server, application server, and PeopleSoft Process Scheduler must be using a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) or Java Development Kit (JDK) that is supported for extended Japanese characters. See the release notes on My Oracle Support website.

See My Oracle Support, Knowledge, Tools and Technology, Documentation, Release Notes.

Validating Field Length

This section provides overviews of Application Designer field length semantics and field length checking for non-Unicode databases and discusses how to enable or disable data field length checking.

Understanding Application Designer Field Length Semantics

The database character set determines the way that PeopleTools interprets the column length that is defined in Application Designer.

If you create a Unicode database, the field length, as shown in Application Designer, indicates the maximum number of Unicode BMP characters that are permitted in the field, regardless of the Unicode encoding that is used by the database. Some database platforms, such as Oracle with byte semantics, use byte lengths to measure column sizes when operating in a Unicode database, while others use character lengths.

When the database uses byte-sized column lengths, the PeopleSoft system sizes the database columns based on the worst-case ratio between bytes and characters in the Unicode encoding that is used by your database. For example, if the AL32UTF8 character set is used by Oracle with byte semantics, the worst-case character-to-byte ratio when running against an Oracle Unicode database is 1:3. So, column size is tripled when creating a Unicode database on Oracle. A field that is defined in Application Designer as a CHAR(10) is created on an Oracle Unicode database with a type of VARCHAR2(30). This tripling of the maximum column size does not affect the actual size of the database, because variable length character fields do not reserve space in the database.

Other database platforms use character-based column lengths whose sizes represent the maximum number of Unicode characters instead of bytes that may be stored. Examples of this implementation are the NCHAR data type in Microsoft SQL Server and the GRAPHIC data type in DB2 UDB for Linux, Unix, and Microsoft Windows.

If you create a non-Unicode database, the field length in Application Designer represents the number of bytes that are permitted in the field, based on the character set that you used to create the database. Therefore, a PeopleSoft Unicode database enables you significantly more space for character data within the database when dealing with ideographic languages, such as Japanese, that require more than one byte storage per character.

The following tables show some of the possible database encodings for database platforms that the PeopleSoft system supports in Unicode and DBCS and their effects on database column sizes. Each table shows the database representation and the worst case number of characters allowed in the character field for a character field defined in Application Designer with a length of 10.

This table shows the information for an Oracle database with byte semantics (used by PeopleSoft 8.9 applications and earlier):

This table shows the information for an Oracle with character semantics (used by PeopleSoft 9.0 applications and later):

This table shows the information for an Microsoft SQL Server database with VARCHAR semantics:

This table shows the information for a Microsoft SQL Server database with CHAR semantics:

This table shows the information for a DB2 UDB for OS/390 and z/OS database:

This table shows the information for all other databases:

Understanding Field Length Checking for Non-Unicode Databases

The maximum number of characters that are permitted in a PeopleSoft field varies, depending on the character set of the database. Because all components of PeopleTools use Unicode for internal storage, by default, field length checking occurs in terms of Unicode character counts. This calculation is appropriate for Unicode databases and for any SBCS databases.

However, if you are using a non-Unicode DBCS, special length checking must occur each time you move off a field to ensure that the string that you entered fits in the database column when the string is converted to the database’s character set.

For graphically sizing page fields, PeopleTools uses the Unicode length of the field as defined in Application Designer. For example, if a field is defined in Application Designer as a 10-character field, page fields in both the PeopleSoft Pure Internet Architecture and the PeopleTools clients for Microsoft Windows allow 10 characters to be displayed unless manually resized by the developer.

However, if the database is encoded in a non-Unicode DBCS character set, such as Japanese Shift-JIS or IBM CCSID 930/939, special length validation must occur because the database column size is created relative to a byte count, not to a character count as is used by the simple field length validation.

For example, if a user enters 10 Japanese characters into a field that is defined as CHAR(10) in Application Designer, this string needs 20 bytes of storage in a nonshifting DBCS character set and 22 bytes of storage in a shifting character set. This 10-character input would fail insertion in both of these databases.

To address this issue, the page processor checks the Data Field Length Checking option on the PeopleTools Options page and performs character-set specific length validation against the contents of each field when the field is validated. Typically length validation occurs when the field’s FieldChange PeopleCode event fires, so the actual time of validation may differ, depending on whether your page uses deferred mode processing.

Enabling or Disabling Data Field Length Checking

To enable or disable data field length checking:

1. Select PeopleTools, Utilities, Administration, PeopleTools Options.

   The PeopleTools Options page appears.

2. From the Data Field Length Checking drop-down list box, select a value based on the character set that you are using for the database:

   Others	Select if you are using a Unicode encoded database or a non-Unicode SBCS database. This option prevents special field length checking, which is not required by these types of databases.
   DB2 MBCS	Select DB2 MBCS if you are running a Japanese database on the DB2 UDB for Linux, Unix, and Microsoft Windows platform. This options enables field length checking based on a shifting DBCS.
   MBCS	Select if you are running a non-Unicode Japanese database on any other platform. This option enables field length checking based on a nonshifting DBCS.

   Note. The non-Unicode DBCS settings are specifically oriented to Japanese language installations, because Japanese is the only language that the PeopleSoft system supports in a non-Unicode DBCS encoding. All languages other than Western European languages and Japanese are supported by the PeopleSoft system only when using Unicode encoded databases.

3. Click the Save button.

Using CJK Ideographic Characters in Name Character Fields

This section discusses PeopleSoft standard name conventions, including name conventions for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) ideographic characters. PeopleSoft standard name conventions apply when data is entered or displayed in character fields that use Name as the format type. These conventions should be used when a complete name is constructed from multiple name character fields or when all name data is entered into a single name character field.

The PeopleSoft standard name convention is:

[lastname] [suffix],[prefix] [firstname] [middle name/initial]

Examples of typical suffixes include degrees, affiliations, and titles such as MD, PhD, Jr., and III. Examples of typical prefixes include titles and honorifics such as Ms., Mr., Dr., Rev., and Hon.

Valid examples of these conventions include:

[lastname],[firstname]

[lastname] [suffix],[firstname]

[lastname] [suffix],[firstname]
[middle name]

[lastname] [suffix],[prefix]
[firstname] [middle initial]

[lastname],[prefix] [firstname]

[lastname],[firstname]

However, if the name contains any CJK ideographic characters, different standard name conventions apply.

If the name contains any Japanese or Korean ideographic characters, the first and last names are separated by a space instead of a comma. In Japanese, a prefix or suffix is optional; in Korean, only an optional prefix can be used. These modified PeopleSoft standard name conventions can be used when a name includes any of the following types of characters:

• Japanese or Korean unified ideographs (Japanese Kanji or Korean Hanja).

• Japanese half-width or full-width Katakana.

• Japanese Hiragana.

• Korean Hangul.

The PeopleSoft standard name convention for Japanese names including these ideographic characters is:

[lastname] [firstname][{suffix|prefix}]

The PeopleSoft standard name convention for Korean names including these ideographic characters is:

[lastname] [firstname][prefix]

Valid examples of these conventions include:

[lastname] [firstname]

[lastname] [firstname][prefix]

[lastname] [firstname]

[lastname] [firstname][prefix]

If the name contains Chinese Hanzi, there is no space or comma between the first name, last name, suffix, and prefix. The PeopleSoft standard name convention for names including Chinese Hanzi characters is:

[lastname][firstname][{suffix|prefix}]

Valid examples of this convention include:

[lastname][firstname]

[lastname][firstname][prefix]

See Also

Specifying Character Field Attributes

Character Processing

Detecting and Converting Characters

PeopleTools also provides PeopleCode string functions that recognize and convert between different characters within the Japanese character set. This enables you to detect, convert, and enforce the types of characters that you can enter in any PeopleSoft field. The PeopleSoft system uses these functions in the development of Alternate Character Architecture in some PeopleSoft applications. Alternate Character Architecture is used in several PeopleSoft applications to provide a feature that enables the entry of, and enforces the characters contained in, Japanese phonetic spellings (Furigana) by using the Hiragana or Katakana scripts.

The following PeopleCode string functions recognize and convert between different characters within the Japanese character set:

• CharType

• ContainsCharType

• ContainsOnlyCharType

• ConvertChar

See Also

CharType