Czech Language / CH Database

jsrark

We have a problem that characters are not dispalyed correctly when the Czech language is selected. ](*,)

Can you please give us some advice.
We are using Nav CH 4.0 on 4.00 SP 3 on SQL.
Our Windows Terminal Servers and SQL Servers are installed in the UK.
We have installed the Czech language granule and my colleagues have changed and changed the local settings.
Is it possible to work with this configuration? How?
Many thanks.
Jonathan Revell

rdebath

Navision is NOT a unicode application it uses the ansi and OEM character sets of windows.

If a machine is setup to use UK English the ansi character set for the entire machine is CP1252. Czech is an ISO Latin 2 language so the machine will be setup to use CP1250 (IIRC)

The best you're going to be able to do it to set the machine to Czech, unfortunately this means that the UK will lose the £ character.

The setting I'm referring to is in "Control Panel->Regional Settings->Advanced->Language for non unicode programs". Set this one to Czech on all machines, all other language options can be set as you like.

When you create the database make sure the client is running on a machine with this character set and in the collation tab make sure "Validate code page" is left turned on.

PS: SQL Server is a unicode application, the machine it's running on does NOT have to be set to Czech unless you're running Nav Clients or a NAS on the machine too.

jsrark

Many thanks.

We use DE and FR and IT and CH on the same terminal server. Do you know of any impact for those languages?
Would it be easier to use a dedicated Terminal Server for CZ?
You mention NAS; might there me an impact if NAS is running on a spearate server?

rdebath

Ooops.

In more detail, there are a number of accented characters in the 1250 character set that are suitable for the required characters German and it's likely to work. French and Italian should work because like German they only use a few characters above 7 bit ascii. But you need to check.

You may find this page useful http://czyborra.com/charsets/codepages.html

If the clients with different character sets are connecting to different databases it will make things easier to have distinct TS machines. The databases would be setup to have different 8-bit character sets (they can be on the same SQL server as SQL server a unicode app). If the clients are all connecting to the same DB there will be no advantage.

NASs have the same requirements as a standard client, except for the GUI. Though as there is no GUI it's quite reasonable to put a NAS inside a virtual machine to deal with the character set issue.

jsrark

Thanks again for the information.
We use VMware for all of the Terminal Servers. We usually have one or two or three terminal servers per "region" connecting with the country/region specific databases which are all on one SQL Server.
We also have a dedicated server for the NAS connecting to each of the databases.
A the moment we have a small commercial operation in CZ and we wanted a cost-effective solution and that's why we have CZ on the CH machine.
I will take your information to our technical team and check on the costs for a dedicated Terminal Server.
Hope to thank you in person one day.

kine

If I am correct, newer windows are able to change the local settings (and the language for non-unicode apps) per user... but I am not sure...

jsrark

Thanks kine.
We are running 2003 on the Terminal Servers but are currently having "problems" with the configuration and have been demoted in the support queue as one of our European Sharepoint Servers is currently out of service.
I will update this thread as soon as we have a working solution.

rdebath

kine wrote:

If I am correct, newer windows are able to change the local settings (and the language for non-unicode apps) per user... but I am not sure...

Nope, sorry, doesn't happen.
There is one ANSI/OEM character set pair on the machine, this pair can only be changed with a reboot.
The GUI and many of the modern application are unicode so they can follow locale settings and change languages on a per process level but Navision isn't one of them.
The GUI for language setting has been changed in Vista and W7 but the underlying structures are the same as XP and 2k.
Navision is still limited to one 8-bit character set per database so if you need to mix languages you have to find an 8-bit windows character set that covers all the characters you need; this is likely to be impossible if you go outside a limited geographical area.

kine

I know that it is still limited, but I think that in Win2k8 server you can change the language for non-unicode app per user and not per machine...

jsrark

Problem resolved and operational.
Dedicated (virtual) Terminal Server and dedicated Navision database in SQL Server.
Many thanks to everyone. =D>