Multiple Languages in one Database

joshplummer

So, we have a company with locations in the US, China, Germany and many others.
We purchased the Chinese localization which gave us support for double byte Characters.
We then setup our servers to display the Chinese characters in the client properly (installed the STX files, did the Regional and Language Settings setup etc).
After that, all the umlauts that were present in our German data now get translated to Chinese characters.

How can I have both character sets coexist?

Example:
Chinese Vendor with a name in Chinese characters.
With Contact name: Klaus RÜSSELSHEIM (note the umlaut), maybe a German engineer working at a plant in China.
The umlaut will appear in Navision as a Chinese character.

See the attached image for real example.

garak

On which Codepage your server work? Then this is the problem of 8bit codepages (like 850) or the codepage 10002 for Chinese.
The only solution is use UNICODE (UTF-8 / 16) (CP 65001).
The Unicode codepage is the only codepage used nowadays at supports all characters of all languages. It is used in Unix since ages, used in Windows 2000 and higher, used everywhere. To underline the fact that most characters used are still ASCII characters, the Unicode codepage is just another extension of the ASCII codepage. So for all regular characters it is as quick as any other single byte codepage, the major difference is that some of the number greater 128 have a special meaning. They will tell that the subsequent byte or bytes are used to address a special character. For example an "Ä" is build of the number 195 followed by a 132. Same number 195 is used for ÖÄÜöäü etc, with the second number different. This is called the UTF-8 representation of Unicode.

Overall, UTF-8 has the advantage that most of the data is still single byte, the trade in is, calculating the length of a string in characters needs careful checking of each character. So UTF-8 is the perfect choice for Western European systems that require a few special charcters only. But if you are dealing with Japanese text almost only you might want to say that all characters are two bytes long always, even if it is a leading zero number for the ASCII chars. That is called UTF-16 (16bit = 2 bytes).

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms776446(VS.85).aspx

Hope you have not broken your fingers to write the Ü ;-)

joshplummer

I really appreciate the response....Problem is, I don't know how to change the codepage on the system.

How do I do that?

Do I need to change the codepage on the database as well?

PureHeart

Did you manage to have both the characters in the system?
Is this really possible? I don't think it is but please let us know how if possible! ](*,)