1.2 When is it necessary to use Multilingual Support?
Multilingual Support is set up at a partition level within a LANSA system.
It is strongly recommended that you use multilingual support for all partitions, even if you only intend to execute your application in a single language.
Aside from this recommendation, there are a variety of situations where it is necessary to set up Multilingual support including:
- You want to produce applications that use a double byte character set (DBCS) (also referred to as ideographic characters (IGC)) such as Chinese, Japanese or Korean.
- You want to produce applications that can run in more than one language.
- You want to produce applications that use a bi-directional language such as Hebrew or Arabic. Note that bi-directional languages are only available for 5250 applications using RDML code.
For applications in bi-directional or DBCS languages you must use multilingual support, regardless of whether or not the resulting applications are truly multilingual (that is, able to operate in more than one language).
Note: The ability to use national language capabilities in a normal LANSA system (without using multilingual support) only applies to languages that use the Latin alphabet (or a derivation from it).
All new partitions created on the IBM i on Japanese and French machines are automatically created as multilingual. All Visual LANSA systems are automatically created as multilingual.