March 31, 2010

Migrate your charset to UTF8 in 3 steps

What do we have to do in your forms application, when the database in the backend is upgraded from a single-byte charset to a UTF8-charset.

First Step

Make a backup of your forms-sources, your local forms installation and your application server configs.

After that change the NLS_LANG in your registry. You can create a backup of the parameter, through creating a new parameter named "NLS_old" with the value of the old NLS_LANG-value. The new value of NLS_LANG is for example "GERMAN_GERMANY.UTF8". This change is for your local forms builder, when you recompile your forms sources.

Now we can edit our local default.env. If there is a line with the NLS_LANG, then change the value to the UTF8-value (see above) or create a new line with the NLS_LANG. This change is for our local OC4J instance only.

Do the same change on the application server (use the OEM for edits)

These changes were the basic environment-changes we need for UTF8.


To be continued with Migrate your charset to UTF8, step 2