Datatypes and capabilities

To send and receive 2-byte characters, the client specifies its preferred byte order during the login phase of the connection. Any necessary byte-swapping is performed on the server side.

The Open Client ct_capability() parameters are as follows:

• CS_DATA_UNITEXT – is a request sent to the server to determine whether the server supports 2-byte Unicode datatypes.

• CS_DATA_NOUNITEXT – is a parameter sent from the client to tell the server not to send unitext for this specific connection.

To access 2-byte character data, Open Client and Open Server implements the following:

• CS_UNITEXT – a datatype.

• CS_UNITEXT_TYPE – a datatype constant to identify the data’s datatype.

Setting the CS_DATAFMT parameter’s datatype to CS_UNITEXT_TYPE allows you to use existing API calls, such as ct_bind, ct_describe, ct_param, ct_setparam, cs_convert and so on.

Since CS_UNITEXT is encoded as a UTF-16 Unicode datatype and stored in the 2-byte format, it can be used anywhere CS_TEXT is used. The maximum length of the CS_UNITEXT string parameter is half of the maximum length of CS_TEXT.

Like CS_TEXT, CS_UNITEXT uses CS_DATAFMT to describe the destination format. The symbols and meanings of the format field values are as follows: