Configuring InterChange Server for an Arabic environment

For proper operation of InterChange Server in an Arabic environment, your software should be configured using the following steps. Arabic environment refers to the software configuration allowing the exchange of BiDi Arabic data using InterChange Server software. The following ICS components have special configuration considerations: the Windows operating system, DB2 as the ICS database system used for internal repository, and finally WebSphere MQ used for communication between ICS components.

Configuring your Windows environment for Arabic

In the context of your Windows operating system, the following parameters affect the behavior of ICS components: default user locale and default DOS prompt code page.

The definition of a default user local affects font selection in the C++ based Tools application. The default user local must be associated with the font covering Arabic characters, otherwise the characters are incorrectly displayed. It is required to set the default user local to Arabic. The following steps decribe how to do this on a Windows 2000 machine.

  1. Select Start->Settings->Control Panel
  2. Double click on the "Regional Options" icon
  3. Select "Input Locales" tab and add new Input language (Arabic). Set it to the default by pressing the button "Set as Default"
  4. Select General tab and select check box next to the Arabic in the "Language settings for the system". Press the "Set default" button.
  5. In the opened window select Arabic from the drop down box and press OK button.

  6. Go back to the General tab and select Arabic local from the "Your locale (location)" drop down list.
  7. Press the OK button.

Please note that at any step you might be asked to restart your system. Please do so and then resume your steps from the same point where you stopped.

Changing your DOS prompt code page

The default code page definition in the DOS prompt might affect the encoding of application data sent to STDOUT. If this data includes Arabic characters, the appropriate code page should be selected to make this data readable in the standard editors. The default Windows Arabic code page supported by most editors is Windows-1256. However, the default code page used by DOS prompts is IBM-864. If no precautions are taken, the UTF-8 encoded data flushed out to the STDOUT by Java applications might not be readable by standard Windows editors and/or viewers.

To set the Windows-1256 encoding as the default encoding in the DOS prompt follow these steps:

  1. Open DOS prompt.
  2. Type "chcp 1256" and press Enter.
  3. Run Java application.
  4. Alternatively, you can change the start up script of the Java application to include this command.

Configuring the ICS database for Arabic

To support correct processing of BiDi data in the ICS server, the repository database should use UTF-8 encoding. Each of the ICS-supported databases has its own way to configure the database for UTF-8 support. The simplest way to do it, and in most cases the only way, is to create the database with UTF-8 support when installing and configuring the database.

For repository database creation, use the standard database creation wizard available from Control Center. Make sure you define the DB encoding and territory settings as shown in the following figure.

Configuring WebSphere MQSeries queues for Arabic

To allow successful communication of ICS components through MQ Series queues using BiDi data, you have to configure the appropriate queue managers in the following way:

  1. Determine the name of MQ queue manager used for ICS communication (check ICS configuration wizard -> WebSphere MQ tab -> Queue Manager Name)
  2. Open a DOS prompt and type: runmqsc <name of queue manager from previous step>. Press Enter.
  3. Type: alter qmgr CCSID(850). Press Enter.
  4. Verify that CCSID was changed to 850 by following entering the command: display qmgr.
  5. Restart the queue manager for the change to take effect.

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