Converting Flat Files Using APIs
In addition to the existing flat file APIs, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne provides APIs for non-Unicode flat files. The Unicode APIs are required when flat file data is written to or read by a process outside of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne. The JD Edwards EnterpriseOne APIs, such as jdeFWrite() and jdeFRead(), do not convert flat file data, which means that the default flat file I/O for character data is in Unicode. If you use JD Edwards EnterpriseOne-generated flat files and the recipient system is not expecting Unicode data, you will not be able to read the flat file correctly. For example, if the recipient system is not Unicode enabled and the system is expecting data in the Japanese Shift_JIS code page (or encoding), you will not be able to read the flat file correctly. To enable the creation of the flat file in the Japanese Shift_JIS page, the application that creates the flat file must be configured using the Unicode Flat File Encoding Configuration program (P93081). If the flat file is a work file or debugging file and will be written and read by JD Edwards EnterpriseOne only, the existing flat file APIs should be used. For example, if the business function is doing some sort of caching in a flat file, that flat file data does not need to be converted.
The JD Edwards EnterpriseOne conversion to Unicode uses UCS-2 encoding in memory, or two bytes per character (JCHAR), for representation of all character data. The character data that is passed to the output flat file APIs needs to be in JCHAR (UCS-2). The input flat file APIs converts the character data from a configured code page to UCS-2 and returns the character in JCHAR (or JCHAR string). The flat file conversion APIs enable you to configure a code page for the flat file at runtime. You use P93081 to set up the flat file code page. Flat file encoding is based on attributes such as application name, application version name, user name, and environment name.
If no code page is specified in the configuration application, the APIs perform flat file I/O passing through the data as it was input to the specific function. For example, jdeFWriteConvert() writes Unicode data and no conversion is performed.