International Considerations for Designing BizTalk Applications
It is strongly recommended that you review the following known issues when you develop your international BizTalk Server applications.
Character Restrictions for Machine Names
Installing BizTalk Server 2004 on machines with names that contain letters outside of the following set is not supported: letters (A-Z, a-z), digits (0-9), hyphens (-), and underscores ( _ ). Only machine names that contain the letters in this set are supported.
Characters do not appear correctly or do not appear at all due to incorrect font and font fallback settings
You may experience issues displaying characters (such as Czech characters) in the BizTalk Server tools hosted in Microsoft® Visual Studio® .NET. To address these issues, you may need to modify the font settings available in the Visual Studio Options tab and select another font that you know supports the characters. You can select Tahoma or Microsoft Sans Serif as the default font for which font fallback capabilities are provided.
Surrogate pair characters displayed as squares in BizTalk Server Administration Console and other BizTalk Server tools
You may not be able to display surrogate pair characters in BizTalk Administration Console and other BizTalk Server tools. Surrogate pairs are a coded character representation for a single abstract character that consists of a sequence of two code units. Make sure you have the appropriate font installed on your system (it is included in the Chinese versions of Office XP and 2003). It may also be necessary to change the font options in the tools that have such capability (Such as Visual Studio .NET).
In other tools without a font setting option, surrogate pair characters will be displayed as squares, such as the Administration Console. If you see squares, the characters are not corrupted; they just can not be displayed properly because of a lack of font support.
Non-ASCII characters and TargetNamespace schema property
The TargetNamespace property of a schema in a BizTalk project defaults to "http://<Project name>.<Schema name>." However, it will be set to http://tempURI.org if non-ASCII characters are used and the length of the namespace is longer than 15 characters.
This is a restriction from the uniform resource identifier (URI) class in the .NET Framework. The URI validation fails if any string has invalid domain name characters and is longer than 15 characters before the first slash, which is the limit for universal naming convention (UNC) names.
When only ASCII characters are used, the host is checked as an Internet host name. The character limit for Internet host names is fewer than 63 characters before the dot. No restriction is imposed on the Internet hostname length when only ASCII characters are used.
Web Services character limitations
If you plan on publishing an orchestration as a Web Service, you may encounter issues with characters used in the orchestration names and port names as those names are used in the Web Services file names (.asmx files) and the virtual directory in the Web Services Publishing Wizard. Only Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 (included in Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003) fully supports Unicode characters. Therefore, if you use an earlier version of IIS or Windows, the names of the orchestrations, ports, Web services and virtual directories names must include only ANSI characters supported by the language version of Windows (for example, Japanese characters are not allowed on an English version of Windows).
Note also that project names for Web Services in Visual Studio .NET are restricted to ASCII characters.
Working with different document encodings
BizTalk Server 2004 supports many different encodings for XML and flat file documents, for example UTF-16, UTF-8, Simplified Chinese GBK, Simplified Chinese GB18030, and so on.
Note For more information about setting up BizTalk Server 2004 Service Pack 1 to use GB18030 characters, download Microsoft KnowledgeBase article 890602 from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=52262.
For inbound documents, BizTalk Server can recognize the encoding declaration in XML documents, such as "<?xml version="1.0" encoding="GB2312" ?>". The flat file schema has a Code Page property to indicate the encoding of the inbound flat file documents.
For outbound documents, XML and flat file assemblers use the Target charset property. If this property is specified, BizTalk Server converts the outbound documents to the specified character set regardless of the original one. If no Target charset property is set, XML uses the UTF-8 protocol and flat files use the code page specified in the flat file schema.
Code Conversion from an unsupported code page to a Windows code page
To implement code conversions from unsupported code pages into a Windows code page, you must create a custom pipeline component.
See Also
Implementing Character Encoding in a Pipeline Component
Handling Encoding in a Disassembler Pipeline Component
Byte-order mark impact on document encoding
BizTalk Server determines character encoding and produces documents with a particular character encoding differently for flat file and XML messages.
See Also
Character Encoding in the Flat File Disassembler Pipeline Component
Character Encoding in the Flat File Assembler Pipeline Component
Character Encoding in the XML Assembler Pipeline Component
Character Encoding in Disassembler Pipeline Components
Schema Editor may contain properties in more than one language
XML Schema Definition language (XSD) property names shown in the Schema Editor Properties window and in the XML source code are not localized, and appear in English in all localized versions. Other properties are shown in the local language. For example, in the simplified Chinese version of BizTalk Server 2004, the schema properties are in English, but additional properties are displayed in Chinese.
Locale-dependent data in flat files
Many locales represent data such as date, time, number, and currency using different formats than those formats defined in the XML standard. For instance, several locales use a decimal separator other than a period (.), so the number five and three quarters may be represented as 5,75.
In BizTalk Server 2004, all fields from flat files except date and time are treated as strings, so that parsing can succeed. However, when using XML validation, the resulting XML message fails during validation against the schema.
For date and time fields, the parser attempts to parse the field value to the DateTime instance using a custom date or time format if it is defined, and writes it in XML format, or uses the original value as a string if date or time format is not defined. Again, if XML validation is used, the resulting date or time may fail validation if a custom date or time format is not used, and the field value used in flat file message was not in the correct XML date or time format.
Note that you can also create custom pipeline components or maps to update field values to produce valid XML.
Using the Find Message View in HAT using a non-English locale
If you run a query in the Find Message View of HAT, and you query on non-English characters, you may get incorrect results if you use the EQUAL operator. Use the LIKE operator instead.
BAM definition language support
Before you can deploy a BAM definition XML file, you must ensure that the language used to create this file matches the locale settings of the computer on which it is being deployed. If the file and the computer settings don’t match, you must first reboot the computer used to run the BM.exe.
Note The BAM definition XML file cannot contain text in multiple languages unless the languages all use the same codepage or only two languages are included and one of them is English.
To change the locale settings on your computer, update the following settings based on your operating system:
| Operating System | Control Panel | Setting |
|---|---|---|
| Windows 2000 | Regional Options | Set the Default button (General tab).
Select the value in the drop-down list. |
| Windows XP | Regional and Language Options | Language for non-Unicode programs (Advanced tab) |
| Windows Server 2003 | Regional and Language Options | Language for non-Unicode programs (Advanced tab) |
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