E National Language Support

E.1 Overview

National Language Support is a technology that enables Oracle applications to interact with users in their native language, using their conventions for displaying data.

The Oracle NLS architecture is data-driven, enabling support for specific languages and character encoding schemes to be added without requiring any changes in source code.

E.2 Languages Supported for Messages

The Oracle Procedural Gateway for APPC is capable of issuing its messages in languages other than English.

Table E-1 shows the currently supported languages in the left column, and the right column presents each language's corresponding language, territory, and recommended character set specifications for use in the language setting. Other character sets can be used, but care must be taken to ensure that the character set used contains the full set of characters required by the specified language.

The language used by the Oracle Procedural Gateway for APPC server is specified by the LANGUAGE parameter in the initsid.ora file for the gateway. The syntax for the LANGUAGE parameter is:

LANGUAGE=language[_territory.charset]

where language, territory, and charset are valid values from the preceding table. If no LANGUAGE parameter is specified in the initsid.ora file, the default language used is American English.

The language used by the Procedural Gateway Administration Utility, PGAU, is specified by the NLS_LANG environment variable, in the same syntax as described for the LANGUAGE parameter for the server. If the NLS_LANG environment variable is not set, then the default language used is American English.

E.3 Languages Supported for Data Conversion

The Oracle Procedural Gateway for APPC does no data conversion in the gateway itself. Instead, all conversion of data flowing between the integrating server and the gateway is performed by the Oracle Integrating Server. This is accomplished through calls within the TIP to the UTL_RAW.CONVERT function, which converts data from the local character set at the integrating server to the character set of the OLTP system.

The character set of the remote OLTP system is specified for:

• single-byte encoded data, using either:

  • PGAU DEFINE TRANSACTION NLS_LANGUAGE character set for an entire transaction

  • PGAU REDEFINE DATA REMOTE_LANGUAGE character set for a single field, if specified.

• double-byte and multi-byte encoded data, using either:

  • PGAU DEFINE TRANSACTION REMOTE_MBCS character set for an entire transaction, or

  • PGAU REDEFINE DATA REMOTE_LANGUAGE character set for a single field, if specified.

This information is generated into the TIP automatically by PGAU.

Languages and character sets supported by the UTL_RAW.CONVERT function are the same as those supported by the Oracle Integrating Server. Refer to the platform-specific documentation for your Oracle Integrating Server for information on which languages and character sets are supported. If your integrating server is on an ASCII platform, then the platform-specific documentation might not list any of the EBCDIC character sets. This does not necessarily mean they are not supported. You should contact Oracle Support Services in this case.