Hello, we have an upstream application using the Japanese Shift JIS character set and downstream applications using either UTF-8 or Shift JIS. We are integrating using webMethods 6.1. Can anyone answer the following:

1. Does webMethods 6.1 support integration between different character sets?
2. What character set does webMethods 6.1 run on? What does it have to be set to to support the Shift JIS and UTF-8 applications? Do patches/service packs have to be added for this support?
   3)What impact does this have on development? Do we have to account for different character sets in our code?
   4)At runtime, how does webMethods perform the transformation? What performance impact does this have?

John,

This thread may shed a little light on the subject.

While there are no built-in services to convert from one Java charset to another, there are JDK classes in the java.nio package that do so. The attached IS package at the bottom of the thread shows one way to use the JDK methods to convert between character sets.

Note: This example requires JDK 1.4 as that was the Java version in which the new java.nio package was introduced. (see the java.nio package JDK docs for more details).

The default charset for most webMethods installations is UTF-8.

If your integration must convert between charsets, you would need to create java services that can be used as transformers on map steps to do this where required.

Simple transformations like these should not be a big drain on performance if implemented as java services and called via MAP step transformers, but you would want to verify this through targeted performance testing.

HTH,

Mark