To be able to work correctly with an ADABAS database that contains national special characters from Windows NT database applications, a TERMCHAR SET must be defined for this terminal in CONTROL. This TERMCHAR SET defines a mapping of the national special characters of the other code to the default code ISO 8859/1.2.
The number of TERMCHAR SETs that can be simultaneously valid for a SERVERDB is limited to eight. For more information, see the CONTROL manual.
For the mapping of German umlauts from the PC character set (code page 850 or 437) to ISO 8859/1.2 and vice versa, a CONTROL command file "termchar.ind" is provided in "%dbroot%\env" which can be used to create a TERMCHAR SET called "ibm437_ger". Usually, this TERMCHAR SET need not be created manually because its creation is part of the installation of a SERVERDB (CONTROL: Init Config). The environment variable DBCHARSET described in the following is also created during the installation of the TERMCHAR SET (see Section Manual Modifications to the System Environment Variables ).
For the installation of a TERMCHAR SET, the following must be taken into account:
- It is recommended to use a comand file.
(The file '%DBROOT%\env\TERMCHAR.ind' used by CONTROL could serve as a model).
- The created TERMCHAR SET is only activated with the next RESTART of the database (i.e., after a SHUTDOWN and subsequent RESTART).
Then it is still necessary to inform the ADABAS tools which TERMCHAR SET is to be used for database communication. Under Windows NT, this is done by setting the environment variable DBCHARSET.
DBCHARSET:
IBM437_GER
This setting is made during the installation of the ADABAS software. It must only be changed when another TERMCHAR SET is to be used.
Now the particular SERVERDB is able either to correctly interpret and store the national special characters sent by the Windows NT database application or to send these characters from the database to the application in the correct code.
Of course, the corresponding TERMCHAR SET must have been defined and activated in the SERVERDB with which an ADABAS application works. If the attempt is made to work with a TERMCHAR SET unknown to the corresponding SERVERDB, this SERVERDB rejects the establishment of a database session with the error message "-4015 unknown termchar set name".