Setting the CHARSET Connection Property

Specify the character set to use in your application by setting the CHARSET driver property.

If you do not set the CHARSET property:

For JCONNECT_VERSION = 2.0, SAP jConnect uses iso_1 as the default character set.
For JCONNECT_VERSION = 3.0 through 6.05, SAP jConnect uses the default character set of the database, and adjusts automatically to perform any necessary conversions on the client side.
For SAP jConnect versions starting with 6.05, if SAP jConnect cannot successfully convert the user data to the negotiated charset, it sends unconverted Unicode characters to the server if the server supports the Unicode characters, otherwise, it throws an exception.

You can also use the -J charset command line option for the IsqlApp application to specify a character set.

To determine which character sets are installed on your SAP Adaptive Server, issue this SQL query on your server:

select name from syscharsets
 go

For the PureConverter class, if the designated CHARSET does not work with the client Java Virtual Machine (JVM), the connection fails with a SQLException, indicating that you must set CHARSET to a character set that is supported by both Adaptive Server and the client.

When the TruncationConverter class is used, character truncation is applied regardless of whether the designated CHARSET is 7-bit ASCII or not. Therefore, if your application must process non-ASCII data (for instance, any Asian languages), do not use TruncationConverter, as this causes data corruption.