This page will explain some Unicode restrictions within the IFS Financials when using some specific export to file functionality.
Full Unicode support within export to file functionalities is not supported for some flows within the IFS Financials. Therefore, it requires the characters in the data to be exported from the client to have the same character set as the in the client's settings. (See the last section on how to obtain the character set currently used in the client). If the data to be exported contains characters other than those known in the client's character set, the values will be represented in the exported file with a default escape value from SQL-Net, often indicated as such (¿) - an upside down question mark.
Consider the following example:
Let us say that a user (User1) is using a client that is set up to handle Japanese
characters. Also, User 1 is aware that the data to be exported includes only Japanese
characters and Standard English characters. Therefore, exporting the data will not
be a problem.
Another user (User2) is going to export the same data that User1 has entered into
the system. However, User2's client is set up to handle English standard characters
and other western European characters. This causes User2 to have problems when exporting
the Japanese characters stored by User1, since User2's client cannot handle the
Japanese characters. The file will be written, but the Japanese characters will
probably be written as (¿) in the file.
Note: This only applies when a database is set up to support Unicode characters and the client is not Unicode compliant. If the client is set up to use the same character set as the database, there will not be a problem since the data uses the same character set.
The character set that the client is using can be found in the registry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ORACLE\HOME\ and then the last section of the value
for the key NLS_LANG e.g., AMERICAN_AMERICA.WE8MSWIN1252
The characters (WE8MSWIN1252) after the dot (.) is the character set that will be
used by the client.