The locale is the part of a user's environment that brings together information about how to handle data specific to the particular country, language, or territory. The locale is typically installed as part of the operating system.
The locale provides the following information for the user environment:
The locale name has the following format:
11_TT.codeset
where 11 is a two-character language code (usually in lower case), TT is a two-letter country and territory code (usually in upper case), and codeset is the name of the associated character code set. The codeset portion of the name is optional. The locale is typically installed as part of the installation of the operating system.
Setting default user locale to a bidirectional locale, (Arabic or Hebrew), is a prerequisite for enabling correct processing of locale-dependent data. If the user default locale is not set to a bidirectional locale, then the bidirectional characters are incorrectly displayed (see System Installation Guide for Windows for more information). The Windows locale setting for Hebrew is usually: iw_IL, and for Arabic it is usually: ar_AE. The ASCII code set for Arabic is 1256 and for Hebrew is 1255 (see System Installation Guide for Windows for details on how to set bidirectional locales).
The Java runtime environment within the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) represents data in the Unicode character code set. Unicode contains encoding for characters in most known character code sets (both single-byte and multibyte). Most components in the WebSphere Business Integration products are written in Java. Therefore, when data is transferred between most WebSphere Business Integration product components, there is no need for character conversion.
If data is transferred between an external application and the WebSphere Business Integration environment, it can be in one-byte character code rather than Unicode which is two-byte, therefore steps need to be taken to make the correct character conversion from one format to another. To address this event, connectors have been internationalized so that they can support both double-byte and single-byte character sets to deliver message text in the specified language. When a connector transfers data from a location that uses one character code set to a broker, it transforms the data from a single-byte code set to a double-byte code set (Unicode) because the integration broker uses Unicode.
Because log and informational messages include data in one-byte code set, the appropriate locale setting is needed for accurate transformation of bidirectional text between Unicode and one-byte code sets. Therefore, to log error and informational messages in the appropriate language and for the appropriate country or territory, configure the locale standard configuration property for your environment to the specific bidirectional language setting. For more information on configuration properties, see Establishing a locale in the System Installation Guide for Windows.