There are functions that end with C (e.g., LENGTHC) that will count
the number of characters and support unicode.  You could enforce the
length limits using this, while making the field length 4x the
intended length.  A PITA, but it could be made to work.

Did BMC give a statement of direction for this issue, or is this a
handicap we are intended to live with?

Axton Grams

On 5/10/07, Hugo Visser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
** 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.
 __20060125_______________________This posting was
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