Character Display Requirements

Commerce Server 2002 works with the character display capabilities provided by Windows 2000 and SQL Server 2000. Your Commerce Server 2002 solution can take full advantage of the multiple character display capabilities provided by these underlying products. There are, however, several key planning questions you must answer in order to work with these capabilities. The following table lists those questions.

Planning question Recommendation
Do you need to display characters that require different code pages within a single Web site? Although it is possible to display characters requiring different code pages on your site, there are several limitations. In general you should plan to maintain a single code page for the following items:
  • Query strings
  • Commerce Server events
  • File names

A single code page is needed for file names because file names can appear in the URL field. IIS Web log files only support single codepages; these log files are imported into the Data Warehouse.

Do you need to display characters that require different code pages for your product catalog items? Create a single base catalog that contains the descriptions. Set the language properties for the appropriate languages. Add code to your site to display the product catalog descriptions using an appropriate code page as is demonstrated in the ASP-Based Catalog Sitelet and the ASP .NET-Based Catalog Sitelet.
Do you need to display characters that require different code pages for your campaign content? In general, you will need to create multiple versions of your campaign content for each language. Marketing campaigns can be linguistically and culturally specific, and may need more than a simple translation. If each campaign item requires a different code page, add code to your site to display the product catalog descriptions using an appropriate code page. For more information, see the ASP-Based Advertising Sitelet and the ASP .NET-Based Advertising Sitelet.

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