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Character encoding and multibyte support in Jitterbit Harmony

Introduction

The default character encoding for the Harmony platform is UTF-8 as of agent version 12.7 and Design Studio version 11.63. In earlier versions, the default encoding is Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1).

Multibyte character support

As of agent version 12.9 and Design Studio version 11.65, Jitterbit officially supports multibyte characters across the Harmony platform. Portuguese, German, and Russian are certified as supported languages.

Supported areas

Multibyte character support includes, among other areas:

  • Names throughout the platform, including project names, operation names, environment names, agent names, global and project variable names, API names in API Manager, schema field names, Connector Builder connector names, Client Certificate names, role names, and organization names.
  • Transformation source data, schema node names, and hardcoded values in transformations.
  • Script contents.
  • String comparisons using == in condition scripts.
  • Filenames when reading or writing files with file-based connectors, including File Share, FTP, Local Storage, and Temporary Storage.
  • String columns in ODBC-connected databases (see jitterbit.scripting.db.multibyte.enable).
  • Data exchanged with connectors.
  • Email notification subjects and bodies.
  • API responses.

This list is not exhaustive; multibyte characters are supported in additional areas of the platform beyond those listed above.

Limitations

Multibyte characters are not supported in the following areas:

  • Jitterbit Message Queue (JBMQ):

    • Message queue names support extended Latin characters (such as those used in Portuguese and German), but not Cyrillic or Chinese characters.
    • JBMQ environments with multibyte characters in their names cannot be enabled in the Management Console Message Queues Settings.

  • User email addresses: Harmony user accounts cannot be registered or created with an email address that contains multibyte characters. This is a limitation of the underlying email delivery service.

  • Microsoft Access databases: Multibyte characters stored in Microsoft Access databases are not read correctly.

  • Cloud Datastore sorting: Sorting Cloud Datastore records by a field that contains multibyte characters does not produce the expected alphabetical order.

  • Field delimiters: A multibyte character used as a field delimiter in a text file format is not processed reliably. Use a single-byte (ASCII) delimiter, or, when a multibyte delimiter is required, use Studio with a Linux agent for the best results.

  • Plugins (deprecated):

    • Plugin names do not support multibyte characters.
    • The File Merger plugin cannot process files with multibyte characters in their filenames.

Override the default character encoding

To use a character encoding other than the default, you can set it explicitly. Some connectors (for example, File Share, FTP, Local Storage, and Temporary Storage) include a configuration option for setting the character encoding.

Alternatively, you can use any of the following Jitterbit variables in a script to set the character encoding:

  • jitterbit.source.db.character_encoding

  • jitterbit.target.db.character_encoding

  • jitterbit.source.text.character_encoding

  • jitterbit.target.text.character_encoding

  • jitterbit.scripting.db.character_encoding

The value should be the code page converter name or alias, as shown in the following example:

$jitterbit.scripting.db.character_encoding="ebcdic-xml-us"