Transparent Unicode Support
Transparent Unicode supports the Ingres nchar and nvarchar data types. It allows OpenROAD applications to access these new data types without the need to substantially change the underlying OpenROAD program variables. Typical changes that must be made are:
• Increasing all varchar(1) and char(1) variables to a minimum of varchar(3) and char(3)
• Taking into account that a character may use more than one byte allocated by the string
Previous versions of OpenROAD supported only single-byte character sets. OpenROAD 6.0 extends this support to multi-byte and UTF-8 character sets. This means that only minimal changes are necessary for existing OpenROAD applications to support character sets such as Simplified Chinese, Korean, and Japanese.
OpenROAD 6.0 uses the XML functionality introduced in OpenROAD 5.1 to enable the transparent migration of existing OpenROAD applications to a UTF-8 environment. Transparent Unicode was implemented in a manner to reduce application migration costs by limiting the amount of application changes required.
For more information, see "Importing UTF-8 Applications and Components" in the Workbench User Guide.