UTF-8 encoded XML/CCDs with CL 5.8

Not sure this will help, but starting sometime between 5.5 and 5.8.5, Cloverleaf started added Encoding as a thread property.  See right click on thread in NetConfig->Thread Properties->Thread tab.

If your source sends non-ASCII characters, which I found our Cerner system does a lot, you get a lot of garbage on the outbound side.  If you changed encoding to bypass for both source and destination threads, this does not happen.

Hope this helps,

I do not know what bypass does, and can only guess it acts like the engine did prior to adding Encoding.  I can tell you it fixed the problems I was having with Cerner Radnet reports filing in Epic.

I had to implement on both inbound and outbound threads.

Hope this helps,

We use a script that simply removes all non-ascii characters.  The core being

regsub -all {[^x00-x7F]} $msg {} msg

This could be modified to remove the lower characters as well, and/or to put in a space.

We were getting characters outside the ASCII 127, which were actually displaying correctly in Epic, like subscripted two.  That is why we needed to make this work.

From what I have seen, bypass still converts the encoding, but when it sends on the message it converts it back to the original.

Be careful if you do translations on the part that has the non-ascii encoding.

If you need to translate the the non-ascii portion, use the binary encoding or use “encoding convertto identity”. binary encoding is as close to an actual bypass encoding as possible.

Just as an additional note. If you write the message to the log file it will not be encoded propery in the log file, including when using binary.

We have upgraded from Cloverleaf 5.6 to Cloverleaf 6.0 and our validation testing kicked out differences for messages with high value character(s) in the range of 128-255.

We then noticed the new encoding drop down in Cloverleaf 6.0 that isn’t in Cloverleaf 5.6 and started tinkering with that.

We also learned after doing hcirootcopy of a site from Cloverleaf 5.6 to Cloverleaf 6.0 the default encoding is set to ASCII so we first tried using binary to get some interfaces working like TIF/RTIF interfaces to our EBCDIC mainframe.

We too have been palying with binary and wondering about bypass.

I have not gotten comfortable with understanding when to use which one and we have been going thru trail and error to try and self educate.

I looked for the encoding mentioned above called “encoding convertto identity”, but don’t see it in Cloverleaf 6.0.

I’m listing the interface encodings that I’m seeing as choices in the Cloverleaf 6.0 GUI/IDE; the bolded ones are the ones we have tried to understanding thus far.

ASCII

Big5

binary

bypass

cyrillic

gb18030

GB2312

greek

hebrew

IBM037

latin1

latin2

latin3

latin4

Shift_JIS

UTF-16

UTF-16BE

UTF-16LE

UTF-8

windows-1252

We had some interfaces that had extended-ASCII characters in them; for those we changed the encoding to Windows-1252.

Thanks,

Jim Cobane

Henry Ford Health

Hi Russ,

The use of “encoding convertto identity” is within a tcl script if you are doing data manipulation or writing to files. You probably wont need to use it if you are not doing anything except passing on.

If you don’t touch the data and just route the message then bypass should be ok, otherwise use binary for your encoding.

I believe bypass takes the data as is and sets the encoding type as UTF-8 for it, rather than going from the specified encoding to UTF-8 and back again on the other side.

My suggestion is to set up the site both in 5.6 and 6.0 run through some data and check that the output is the same.

We changed encoding to bypass and it worked just fine for us, no need for other scripting, etc.

Hope this helps,