A UTM application on BS2000 system can be programmed such that communication partners with different languages can receive the messages from the program units in their respective language. Even regional differences within a language can be taken into account. Date specifications, time, units of measurement, and currency symbols can be displayed in accordance with language-specific conventions.
To display the fonts and special characters of the individual languages on a terminal or printer, you may require various extended character sets (8-bit codes or Unicode). Using the BS2000 software product XHCS (Extended Host Code Support), several extended character sets can be used simultaneously on a BS2000 system. openUTM supports the functions of XHCS. This means that you can assign a particular language environment – also called a locale – to the UTM objects. In other words, you can assign a standard locale. Individual users and LTERM partners that clients use to connect to the application are assigned specific locales that are used to edit the messages.
To implement multilingualism in UTM applications, openUTM offers the following functions.
When generating the application, specific languages and the character sets to be used for output can be assigned to the application, the user IDs, the LTERM partners, and the LTERM partners of the LTERM pools. In this case you define locales, which define the language environment and character set, for the objects.
You can define locales for user message modules that take account of language-specific requirements. These language-specific message modules are assigned to users and LTERM partners whose language and territorial identifiers match the locale of the language-specific message module. See also chapter "UTM messages".
While the application is running, you can change the assignment of language and character set for your user ID. The KDCS interface provides the SIGN CL call for this purpose.
Using the variants INIT PU and INFO LO of the function calls INIT and INFO, a UTM program can read the language and character set of the user ID, the application, a particular LTERM partner, or the LTERM partners in a pool. The program unit thus obtains information on the character sets supported by the terminal and the character set of the input message. With this information, the program unit can correctly interpret the input of the user and send messages to the user in the correct language and with the appropriate character set.
If the message of a program unit is sent to a terminal/printer, openUTM transfers the logical message of the program unit to VTSU-B together with the name of the character set to be used for editing. VTSU-B edits the message for outputting to the terminal or printer. For information on the character set is used to edit a message please refer to the openUTM manual „Programming Applications with KDCS”.
If the job submitter in a service is a partner program, the logical message is transferred to the job submitter without editing.
The program unit can use INFO LO to request information from openUTM regarding the language and character set of the LTERM partner, and the character sets supported by the terminal/printer assigned to this LTERM partner. The character set used to edit the message for outputting to the terminal/printer must be compatible with one of the character sets supported by this terminal/printer.
Before discussing these functions, we will explain specific XHCS terms.