TRANSFER Programming Manual

Messages Processed within Standard Sessions
National Language and Character Set Support
40970 Tandem Computers Incorporated 7–5
character maps is that they allow people to use different kinds of terminals to interact
with the TRANSFER delivery system.
In a running TRANSFER system, the character maps reside in a file managed by the
Text Server process. These maps are customized to support the characters used in the
corresponding national language. A French correspondent's terminal, for instance,
uses a different character map from the one used by an English correspondent's
terminal.
From your point of view as a programmer, the important thing to remember is that the
character map used within a session determines the native code in which your
program:
Supplies object names in UOW fields to the TRANSFER delivery system
Receives object names in UOW response fields from the TRANSFER delivery
system
In other words, in the UOW fields, your program presents native codes rather than
ASCII character codes. Thus, your program needs to recognize or generate different
field values depending on the character map in use.
To ensure the correct mapping between the characters that a correspondent enters or
observes on the screen and the native codes that your program transmits to and
receives from the TRANSFER delivery system, you must:
Ensure that the correspondent's profile is set up to properly reflect the terminal
that the correspondent normally uses
Specify accurately, in the START-SESSION-B40 UOW that initiates each session,
the character set and map desired for the session
Always remember that TRANSFER character maps do not deal with the treatment of
all text in general. Instead, these maps apply only to the names of correspondents,
folders, and distribution lists that users enter and with message text (including object
names) that the TRANSFER delivery system generates.
Messages Processed
within Standard Sessions
If you use the START-SESSION-B40 UOW to initiate a standard TRANSFER session,
you can programmatically specify the character map that is to apply to messages
generated during this session. With this UOW, you select the map by entering a pair of
numbers in the following two subfields of the CHAR-MAP-ID field:
CODE-PAGE-ID specifies the base character set presently configured for your
TRANSFER system.
CODE-SET-ID specifies the character map applied to that base character set.
If you do not specify a character map in this UOW, the TRANSFER delivery system
applies the default map configured for your node. This default map is indicated by
the SYSTEM-LANG-CMAP-ID configuration entity.
After a session begins, the character map for the session cannot be changed.