Hi folks

I'm trying to get up to speed with GLS, and I can't seem to do
anything which triggers an error contrary to what the GLS manual
claims is the purpose of the DBNLS setting:

<quote>
The DBNLS environment variable specifies whether automatic data type
conversion is supported between NCHAR and NVARCHAR database columns
and CHAR and VARCHAR variables (respectively) of the client systems.

Conversely, setting no value for DBNLS disables automatic conversion
between CHAR and VARCHAR variables of the client application and NCHAR
and NVARCHAR columns of the database, and also prevents Dynamic Server
from using the locale files of the client system:

setenv DBNLS
unsetenv DBNLS
</quote>

I've tried using fr_fr.8859-1 locale to create a database and table
with CHAR and NCHAR, then tried to operate on it using de_de.8859-1
but I'm not seeing an error when I assign a CHAR to NCHAR or vice-
versa in dbaccess.

Does the engine or the client require this setting (or both)?

What's it supposed to do exactly?

On Oct 17, 10:02*pm, "Andrew Clarke, Civica"
<a.andrew.cla... (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:
DBNLS pre-dates GLS.

NLS was (is) POSIX National Language Support, a set of mechanisms for
handling multiple locales within a single application binary.

DBNLS turned on NLS handling in IDS.

One of the problems with NLS was that different platforms had
different degrees of support for it - it did not provide a uniform
internationalization environment (even ignoring the issues on
Windows).

The Informix solution to this was Global Language Support - GLS -
introduced with the 7.20 family of products and still in use today.

These days, you should not use DBNLS - unless you were using it in the
days of 6.00, 7.00, or 7.1x, in which case you might keep it lurking
around for backwards compatibility. But ideally, you should not use
it even so.

Yours,
Jonathan Leffler

On Thu, 21 Oct 2010 02:19:18 Jonathan Leffler wrote:

sysdbopen() procedure dominate the assignment of locale? We only need a
fixed locale, and we want every connecting product to use it, so
anything that can avoid visiting hundreds of PC's to reset the locale in
the registry would be very useful.

floating active threads to the top, just keeping them in order of
original post. But it looked very quiet through that port hole.

I've just successfully fixed my mailing list entry through the iiug, -
on the 10th attempt over the last few years. I don't know what's
different but at least it's sorted now.

rushed powerpoint with all the brightly colored stuff I've only seen in
roadshows before.