The complete CCSID Q&A

Hi,


While the title maybe a bit misleading, I hope the final result will be more or less like that.


The facts, currently I see various systems at customer locations that still have QCCSID set to 65535 of which I know it is a bad thing so I'm trying to find out what the implication of changing this to a normal value is. In my investigation I found already a few things;


The database currently does have a (correct or at least a non-65535) CCSID so having QCCSID set to 65535 or not doesn't seem to make any difference as far as FTP and ODBC is concerned. This means the main issue is how screens handle the data (which indirectly impacts FTP/ODBC however by themselves they aren't the issue).


Setting the emulator codepage and/or job CCSID does have an impact on what I see, but this is again is impacted by whether the DSPF is compiled with CHRID(*DEVD or *JOBCCSID). While the last one is not the default, it however provides the best results, not only for database fields, but as well for constants on the screen (all my tests are based on just both the square brackets, ie. [] ) So the question is, should I change the compile option on CRTDSPF ?


This brings me to the next system value... QCHRIDCTL which is also set by default to *DEVD ? Would I need to change this one to *JOBCCSID (and change my CRTDSPF to CHRID(*CHRIDCTL) ?), or can this cause other issues. I already read some conflicting things about *JOBCCSID... some IBM documents say that panel-groups don't support it, others explicitely mention panel-groups ?


Whats facinates me is that when using CHRID(*JOBCCSID) on the display file it doesn't matter how my emulator is set, nor how the job is set... so I tested with 37 and 1148 but all four combinations show the data correctly for the database and the constants ? Using CHRID(*DEVD) there's only one combination, being emulator AND job set at 1148 to have everything correct ?


For people that use the default of *DEVD, I wonder how you make sure that every emulator in the company is set correctly as the smallest mistake results in corrupting your data. Would you check if the device codepage is different from the QCCSID value... and terminate the logon ?


Digging deeper and deeper in all this makes me only more confused... the question remains, what is the ideal setting of all this and why (or why shouldn't I use certain settings) ?


Thanks in advance,

Paul


PS. The 621 pages IBM i Globalization manual didn't help me !