If you exchange messages between applications that run on systems that are incompatible in some way, you can configure your system to provide data conversion as the message passes through the broker.
Data conversion might be necessary if either of the following two values are different on the sending and receiving systems:
This behavior might be affected by the use of other products in conjunction with IBM Integration Bus. Check the documentation for other products, including any databases that you use, for further code page support information.
If the native CCSID and encoding on the sending and receiving systems are the same, you do not need to call data conversion processes.
IBM Integration Bus and WebSphere MQ provide data conversion facilities to support message exchange between unlike systems. Your choice of which facilities to use depends on the characteristics of the messages that are processed by your message flows:
Read this section if your messages are WebSphere MQ messages that contain all text (character data or string).
If WebSphere MQ supports the systems on which both sending and receiving applications are running for data conversion, use WebSphere MQ facilities which provide the most efficient data conversion option.
The default behavior of WebSphere MQ is to put messages to queues specifying the local system CCSID and encoding. Applications issuing MQGET can request that the queue manager provides conversion to their local CCSID and encoding as part of get processing.
To use this option:
If you require more sophisticated data conversion than WebSphere MQ provides in this way (for example, to an unsupported code page), use WebSphere MQ data conversion exits. For more information about these, see the Application Programming Reference section of the WebSphere MQ Version 7 product documentation online.
Read this section if your messages include numeric data, or are text only but are not WebSphere MQ messages.
If these messages can be predefined (that is, their content and structure is known and predictable), use the facilities provided by IBM Integration Bus and the MRM.
All application messages are handled by the broker in Unicode, to which they are converted on input, and from which they are converted on output. You can configure message flows to influence the way in which output messages are constructed.
To use this option:
For example, to set values for a target z/OS® system running with CCSID of 37 and encoding of 785:
SET OutputRoot.MQMD.CodedCharSetId = 37;
SET OutputRoot.MQMD.Encoding = 785;
Read this section if your messages are self-defining.
Self-defining messages are supported in the XML and JMS domains. These messages are all text and can be handled by WebSphere MQ, if they originate from, or are destined for, WebSphere MQ applications. If not, use IBM Integration Bus facilities by setting the CCSID and Encoding fields in the Properties folder in the message when it passes through a Compute node.