Welcome at the SAP on IBM i update! This time we will focus on the replacement of the ASCII NW RFC SDK in ILE by a UNICODE version:
Many of you already have recognized that there are several versions of the NW RFC SDK available for OS/400, while there is normally only one version for all of the other platforms. This standard version is a UNICODE one which we also ship (NWRFCU_xxx.SAR). Because most of you are not familiar in writing PASE c-Programms to link against this standard version we also ship some ILE versions of the NW RFC SDK.
The easiest version to use is the EBCDIC one (NWRFC_E-xxx.SVF). It allows to simply write a native ILE PGM to link against this version. But this version has many restrictions. It only accepts the latin characterset specified by the SAP Codepage 0120. For this reason we also supported an ASCII Version (NWRFC_A-xxx.SVF) as we are used to from the classic RFC SDK. Unfortunately this does not really work for the NW RFC SDK. So we were urged to ship an additional UNICODE Version (NWRFC_U-xxx.SVF).
This version has to be used in any case where the SAP Codepage 0120 is not sufficient. The ASCII version is now obsolet and will never be patched again.
Unfortunately the UNICODE version requires a full UNICODE handling of the SDK library interfaces. Every imported/exported string to the library must and will be UNICODE and the RFC Programm has to handle this.
For more information, please see SAP Note 1097997 'Installing SAP NW RFC SDK on IBM i' .
Stay tuned...
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