Hello List, I was wondering how many of you are running an ar system install in unicode mode for your applications. Here's my situation: we develop an out of the box workflow application called ExpertDesk that supports multiple locales. Currently they are English, Dutch, German, Polish and French. Because of future developments we'd like to switch to the use of unicode servers, because currently a customer cannot run Polish and English on the same server (since those languages use a different character set). However there's one big "gotcha" which you may or may not be aware of and this is what is causing me headaches :)
The input length of fields in the AR System are not checked on the amount of characters, but on the amount of bytes those characters translate to. What this means is that if a field has set a input length of 30, in the current situation it can always hold exactly 30 characters or less. But in the unicode situation it can hold up to 30 characters, since a character may be encoded in 1-4 bytes (UTF-8). In theory this implicates that if I set the input length to 30 it could happen dat only 7 characters (25%) can be entered. Now this is all documented in the unicode whitepaper for 7.0.1, and the suggestion given there is to increase the field length. But unless I switch all fields to 0 (long) fields, there will always be an unexpected limit. And setting all fields to 0 isn't a great option either. Apart from that how do we document this limitation or explain it to the users? Do you document that a field can "hold up to 30 characters"? So my question would be how you guys are handling this situation and if there is maybe something clever that I've not thought of to overcome this? Thanks, Hugo PS. I've submitted an issue for this, and I got the response that it is "as designed". I've opened an RFE (SW00265962) so that the input length would be the input length in characters, not in bytes in all cases. _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org ARSlist:"Where the Answers Are"
