OSF DCE Administration Guide--Introduction

Configuring DCE
8.12 Building a Code Set Registry
A "character set" is a group of characters, such as the English alphabet, Japanese
Kanji, and the European character set. A "code set" is a mapping of the members of a
character set to specific numeric code values. Examples of code sets include ASCII,
JIS X0208 (Japenese Kanji), and ISO 8859-1 (Latin 1). Different code set encodings
exist for different character sets, but in addition, the same character set can be encoded
in different ways.
A DCE cell automatically supports RPC applications that use the DCE Portable
Character Set (DCE PCS), which is analogous to the U.S. English character set, and
the ASCII and EBCDIC encodings for that character set. An internationalized DCE
cell supports RPC applications that use non-English character sets and code sets other
than ASCII and EBCDIC. In an internationalized DCE cell, multiple different
character sets and code sets can exist, and also multiple different code sets for the
same character set can exist. Operating systems generally use string names to refer to
the code sets that the system supports. It is common for different operating systems to
use different string names to refer to the same code set. For example, one system can
use the name "ISO8859-1" while another system can use "Latin-1". Both names refer
to the same code set.
The DCE code set registry provides a mechanism for uniquely identifying code sets
and the character sets they encode across multiple heterogeneous operating systems in
an internationalized DCE cell. The code set registry is a per-host file that contains
mappings between the string names that the host’s operating system platform uses for
the code sets it supports and the unique identifiers for those code sets. Assigning a
unique identifier to a code set provides internationalized DCE RPC clients and servers
with a common representation to use when referring to a given code set.
If you are configuring an internationalized DCE cell, you need to build a code set
registry on each machine in the cell. The next sections describe the steps involved.
8.12.1 Creating the Code Set Registry Source File
The Code Set Registry Compiler csrc creates a character and code set registry from
the information supplied in a character and code set registry source file. Code set
registry source files are created for input to csrc in two stages:
• During DCE licensee porting of DCE to one or more operating system platforms
• During the creation of an internationalized DCE cell or when a DCE machine is
being configured for use in an internationalized DCE cell
In the first stage, DCE licensees create code set registry source files when they are
porting DCE to a specific operating system platform and plan for their DCE product to
support internationalized DCE applications. DCE licensees receive from OSF a
‘‘template’’ character and code set registry source file that contains the unique
identifiers that OSF has assigned to the character sets and code sets that have been
‘‘registered’’ with OSF. (This file exists in src/rpc/csrc/csr/code_set_registry.txt.)
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