Data conversion
Convert data that your message flows are transferring between different environments by using WebSphere® MQ or IBM® Integration Bus facilities.
Data conversion is the process by which data is transformed from the format that is recognized by one operating system into the format that is recognized by a second operating system with different characteristics such as numeric order.
If you are using a network of systems that use different methods for storing numeric values, or you need to communicate between users who view data in different code pages, you must consider how to implement data conversion.
- Code page conversions
- Code page conversion might be required for one or more of the following reasons:
- ASCII versus EBCDIC
- Code pages that are specific to national language
- Code pages that are specific to operating systems
In WebSphere MQ, these factors are handled by the CCSID field in the MQMD header. For more information about the MQMD header, see "MQMD - Message descriptor" in the Application Programming Reference section of the WebSphere MQ Version 7.5 product documentation online. For more information about code page support, see "Code page conversion", also in the Application Programming Reference section.
- Encoding
- Encoding (byte order) conversion might be required for one or both of the following reasons:
- Big endian versus little endian
Endian is an attribute of data that describes whether it is stored in computer memory or transmitted with the most significant byte first (big endian) or last (little endian).
- Floating point number representations
In WebSphere MQ, these factors are handled by the Encoding field in the MQMD header. For more information about the MQMD header, see "MQMD - Message descriptor" in the Application Programming Reference section of the WebSphere MQ Version 7.5 product documentation online. For more information about encoding, see "Machine encoding", also in the Application Programming Reference section.
- Big endian versus little endian
- Messages received across a WebSphere MQ protocol that uses WebSphere MQ headers, contain code page encoding characteristics in the MQMD header, and optionally in other WebSphere MQ headers.
- Messages received across protocols that do not use WebSphere MQ headers do not include these characteristics. Configure these characteristics by using properties on the nodes in your message flows. For example, set the Message coded character set ID and Message encoding properties on the FileInput node.
- Messages sent across a WebSphere MQ protocol contain code page encoding characteristics in the MQMD header, and optionally in other WebSphere MQ headers.
- Messages sent across protocols that do not use WebSphere MQ headers must be modified to include these characteristics in the Properties folder in the logical message tree structure. The parser called by the output node uses these values to generate the correct bit stream.
When you use IBM Integration Bus, you can use the data conversion facilities of IBM Integration Bus, WebSphere MQ, or both.