SNA National Language Support

Microsoft® Host Integration Server 2000 is composed of many components, including 3270 Client, 5250 Client, NetView services, MSMQ-MQSeries bridge, COM Transaction Integrator, and OLE DB providers. In past versions of SNA Server, most components used a variety of methods for supporting different national languages and character sets and for converting between EBCDIC host character code sets and ANSI code pages for the PC. For East Asia languages such as Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, the TrnsDT API was used for double-byte character stream (DBCS) conversions. For other languages, a component's own proprietary functions were often used for single-byte character stream (SBCS) conversions. It was common for two components or applications to use different functions for converting strings from EBCDIC to ANSI and from ANSI to EBCDIC. The methods used were quite varied and the code page support was not entirely consistent across products.

All of this changed with the release of SNA Server version 3.0 which introduced a standard SNA National Language Support (SNANLS) API for supporting national languages. The SNANLS API was developed to standardize the way in which national languages and locales are supported on SNA Server. SNANLS was designed to handle string conversion necessary for supporting a wide range of host and PC code pages. The new components developed for SNA Server 3.0 and later, such as the Host Print Service and Shared Folders Service, use SNANLS API to convert strings from EBCDIC to ANSI and from ANSI to EBCDIC.

The SNA National Language Support API is the standard means to convert strings in Host Integration Server 2000, SNA Server 4.0, and SNA Server 3.0. SNANLS presents a single interface to applications that need strings converted from one code page to another. These conversions may be EBCDIC-to-ANSI, ANSI-to-EBCDIC, EBCDIC-to OEM code pages, OEM-to-EBCDIC, EBCDIC-to-ISO code pages, and ISO-to-EBCDIC. Additionally, SNANLS supports the broadest possible range of host and PC code page conversions.

SNANLS provides a uniform interface for programmers, hiding the details and difficulties of string conversion. SNANLS supports both SBCS and DBCS conversions. The actual string conversion is handled by two other lower-level APIs. For SBCS conversions, SNANLS uses the system-provided Win32® NLS API that is resident on Microsoft Windows® XP, Windows 2000, Windows NT® 4.0, and Windows NT 3.51. For use on Windows Millennium Edition, Windows 98, and Windows 95 systems, Host Integration Server 2000 and SNA Server include a version of the SNANLS DLL which provides integrated support for NLS and Unicode conversions. For DBCS conversions, SNANLS uses the TrnsDT API developed by the SNA Server team. The TrnsDT API is installed with Host Integration Server 2000, SNA Server 4.0, and SNA Server 3.0.

SNANLS is supported on Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows NT, Windows Millennium Edition, Windows 98, and Windows 95. The goal for all future development is to use only SNANLS.

This section contains:

Show: