Home » WebFOCUS Newsletter Jan-Feb 2012 » WebFOCUS Unicode Support And Configuration

WebFOCUS Unicode Support And Configuration

By Gil Rodriguez

A rapidly growing number of companies has been adapting Unicode in their systems to support multilingual applications and data. With that in mind, Information Builders has added Unicode support for the WebFOCUS Client since WebFOCUS Version 7 Release 7.02.

Prior to the 7.7.02 release, the WebFOCUS Client had support for self-service deployment only.

Unicode is now supported for the following:

  • The WebFOCUS Client, including the Business Intelligence Dashboard, the Business Intelligence View Builder, the WebFOCUS Administration Console, Managed Reporting Administration, and Magnify, with the exception of the Managed Reporting Applet.
  • Managed Reporting Change Management and Business Intelligence Dashboard Change Management.
  • The reporting tools – Report Assistant, Graph Assistant, InfoAssist for Managed Reporting, Personal InfoAssist, Advanced Graph Assistant, and Power Painter – with the exception of Quick Data.
  • ReportCaster, with the exception of the ReportCaster API and Two-Way Email.
  • Developer Studio, with the exception of Maintain, Visual Discovery, and RStat.
  • Migration: Unicode migration is available for customers choosing to migrate their existing WebFOCUS 7.6 Managed Reporting and Business Intelligence Dashboard environments to a Unicode-configured WebFOCUS 7.7 environment. The migration will convert specific repository data and files to Unicode. Migration from releases prior to WebFOCUS 76 are not supported.
  • Self-service deployment.

What Is Unicode, and Why Use It?

Unicode is a universal character-encoding standard that assigns a different code to every character and symbol in every spoken and written language in the world. Unicode is the only encoding standard that ensures you can retrieve or combine data using any combination of languages. It is supported in many operating systems, all modern browsers, and many other products. It is required by modern standards such as XML, Java, LDAP and other Web-based technologies.

Unicode supports data with multiple scripts such as French, Japanese, and Hebrew. It enables you to combine records from different scripts on a single report. The main benefit of a Unicode configuration is the ability to have multiple languages (European and Asian) in the following objects:

  • Titles, descriptions and synonym names
  • Headings, footings
  • Parameter names and values in procedures
  • Column names, titles, and data
  • Data for supported adapters, such as Oracle, DB2 and Sybase

Configuring WebFOCUS for UTF-8 Encoding

Below are some steps for configuring a WebFOCUS environment for UTF-8 (UCS, or Universal Character Set, Transformation Format – 8-bit.)

We’ll start with the application server configuration, which is Tomcat. In the Apache Tomcat Properties dialog, under the Java tab, add the following line to the Java Options (Screen 1):

-Dfile.encoding=UTF8

 

  Screen 1

The following configuration is required to drill down to procedures named with NLS characters:

  1. Edit server.xml, which is located under C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcatxx\conf.
  2. Add the following parameter to the connector:

useBodyEncodingForURI="true”

The following configuration is required to pass a URL with NLS characters (for example, running an HTML form named with NLS characters):

  1. Edit server.xml, located under C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat\conf.
  2. Add the following parameter to the Connector port section (Screen 2):

    URIEncoding="UTF8"

Screen 2

  3. Recycle the Tomcat Application Server to activate it.          

On Unix, when using the Apache Web Server and Tomcat Application server or the IIS and Tomcat configuration:

  1. Edit server.xml located under the Tomcat.../conf directory.
  2. Add the following parameter to the Apache HTTP Connector port section:

useBodyEncodingForURI="true"

Note: To verify the useBodyEncodingForURI parameter is set correctly, you can access the following URL: http://machinename:{port}/ibi_apps/nls/nlsInfo.jsp

The following additional parameter is required for the Tomcat Application server running on the Unix platform:

  1. Edit the catalina.sh file located under the Tomcat.../bin/ directory.
  2. Add the following parameter:

CATALINA_OPTS="-Dfile.encoding=UTF8"

  1. Recycle the Tomcat Application Server to activate.

Websphere

In the Integrated Solutions Console, the following line should be added to the Generic Java Virtual Machine arguments in the General Properties under Application servers > your_application_server > Process Definition > Java Virtual Machine (Screen 3):

-Dfile.encoding=UTF8 -Dclient.encoding.override=UTF8

Screen 3

International Fonts and PDF output

International Fonts must be installed in order to view international characters correctly. From the Control Panel, Open the Regional and Language Options. Select the Languages Tab and click both checkboxes under Supplemental Language Support to install additional fonts. You will need the Windows CD or access to the i386 files to complete the font installation.

The following fonts support Unicode when reporting from a Unicode data source and using PDF output format:

  • Lucida Sans Unicode, which is used to display single-byte characters only. This font is available on Windows version 2000 and higher.
  • Arial Unicode MS, which is used to display both single-byte and double-byte characters. This font can be installed as an option from the Microsoft Office CD, version 2000 and higher.

Note: Predefined templates may use stylesheets that refer to fonts that do not support Unicode. Please make sure to change the font if using such a stylesheet.

Code Page Configuration

The client and server code pages can be configured via the NLS sections of the WebFOCUS Administration Console and Reporting Server Web Console.

Client: 65001 (Windows and UNIX)

Server: 65001 (Windows and UNIX)

DBMS considerations

Oracle

When requesting Unicode data from an Oracle Database, the following configuration must be done in order for the unicode data to be transcoded correctly:

SET NLS_LANG=AMERICAN_AMERICA.UTF8 right below the @echo off in the /wfs/bin/edastart.bat file of the WebFOCUS Reporting Server.

ReportCaster

  1. Edit the schbkr.bat file located under \ibi\WebFOCUS77\ReportCaster\bin.
  2. Add the following parameter:

-Dfile.encoding=UTF8

For Derby:

  1. Edit the start.bat file located under ibi\derby\bin.
  2. Add the following parameter:

-Dfile.encoding=UTF8

In the ReportCaster configuration section of the WebFOCUS Administration Console, verify that the following code page values are set:

Dserver Codepage: 65001

Webserver Codepage: 65001

Zip Encoding: UTF8

WebFOCUS Developer Studio

There are no specific configurations required to configure WebFOCUS Developer Studio for Unicode.