Considerations When Attaching Text Files

The PeopleCode file attachment functions do not provide text file conversions when files are attached or viewed. In fact, when any file is uploaded, it is always copied to the specified destination byte-for-byte.

WARNING:

You may encounter problems when a text file is uploaded from one operating system or environment and then later viewed on another. For instance, suppose a text file on a DB2 system is encoded in EBCDIC. A user viewing that file in a Windows environment might see garbled content because the text file viewer is expecting ANSI encoding.

Similar issues can occur when two file systems have different character sets, such as Japanese JIS and Unicode, or different line endings.

It is the developer's responsibility to manage this issue in their environments. A number of text file conversion utilities are available for various platforms.

Some steps you can take to avoid conversion problems include:

• Educate your users.

• Standardize on file formats and encodings.

• Make sure that the user's environment supports the files being transferred.

• Restrict attachments to file types that are known to be compatible across user platforms.