The sessions listed below are for informational purposes only. The final schedule will be available through the IBM TechXchange session catalog, and the IBM Events app will be the official App for NAViGATE. You can build your personal schedule there, as well as see full set of sessions available to you as an attendee.
Log in to add sessions to your schedule and sync them to your phone or calendar.
In the modern IT world, data in different languages and move over in data in different writing system must be exchanged, maintained and stored. For data exchanged over the web in JSON or XML format is UTF-8. In UTF-8 a single character can have 1-4 Bytes. For RPG developers, this brings new challenges: By default, RPG automatically converts all data – including constants, variables, external data structures, and columns in tables processed via Native I/O – into the job’s CCSID at runtime. This behavior can have serious consequences when certain characters cannot be converted and are replaced by substitution characters, leading to potential data loss. Length calculations and alphanumeric built-in functions can also produce unexpected results, since RPG internally operates in bytes rather than characters. This becomes a problem as soon as multi-byte characters are involved. Since IBM i 7.2, it has been possible to define variables with a specific CCSID, such as UTF-8. But what about all the other data objects that are not explicitly defined this way?
