## Overview - Writing Internationalized RPC Applications

An internationalized DCE RPC application is one that:

· Uses the operating system platform's locale definition functions to establish language-specific and culture-specific conventions for the user and programming environment

· Isolates all user-visible messages into message catalogs using the sams (symbols and message strings) utility

· Uses the DCE general-purpose application messaging routines (dce_msg_* and dce_svc_) to display all program messages

· Uses DCE RPC-provided or user-defined character and code set evaluation and automatic conversion features to ensure character and code set interoperability during the transfer of international characters in remote procedure calls between RPC clients and servers.

A locale defines the subset of a user's environment that depends upon language and cultural conventions. A locale consists of categories; each category controls specific aspects of some operating system components behaviors. Categories exist for character classification and case conversion, collation order, date and time formats, numeric non-monetary formatting, monetary formatting, and formats of informative and diagnostic messages and interactive responses.

The locale also determines the character sets and code sets used in the environment. The syntax and use of a locale definition function depends on the operating system platform in use with DCE. See your operating system programming guide and reference documentation for a description of the system's locale definition functions and locale categories.

The sams utility provides DCE services and application programs with a method for defining and cataloging user-visible messages, while the DCE messaging functions allow DCE services and application programs to display messages in a consistent manner. DCE Application Messaging describes how to develop an application that uses the DCE messaging routines and how to use the sams utility to create and generate message catalogs. See the OSF DCE Application Development Reference for a description of DCE messaging routine syntax, and the sams(1dce) reference page in the OSF DCE Command Reference for a description of sams usage.

The remainder of this topic describes the DCE RPC features for character and code set interoperability in remote procedure calls that are available to programmers who are developing internationalized DCE RPC applications. The first topic describes the concepts of character sets, code sets and code set conversion and explains the default character and code set conversion mechanism that the RPC runtime protocol supports for remote procedure calls. The remaining topics describe the execution of a remote procedure call when it uses the DCE RPC features for character and code set interoperability, and explains how to build an RPC application that uses these features.

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