The non-unicode clients are the older clients were built to work with previous version of the Essbase API. These clients deal entirely in short strings and non-unicode encoding. These older clients cannot deal with the longer strings and are, therefore, restricted to dealing with non-Unicode-enabled applications.
This type of client can not edit the outlines or rules files on a Unicode mode server.
A Unicode-enabled server can communicate in non-Unicode mode with non-Unicode clients.
The non-Unicode clients can edit outlines and rules files while not connected to a server. However, encoding can be an issue for non-Unicode clients editing rules files and for Unicode clients editing rules files and outlines.
When editing rules files or outlines a Unicode mode server, the user can select the format of the output file or let it default to being the same as the input file. The permissible output file formats are:
Non-Unicode format - short strings and non-Unicode encoding
Unicode format - long strings and UTF-8 encoding
The files are edited internally in non-Unicode encoding by non-Unicode clients and in Unicode encoding by Unicode clients.
If the input file is to be converted from Unicode format to non-Unicode format, but cannot be converted because it contains strings that are too long, then the conversion is aborted and a diagnostic is returned to the user.