Commerce Server: Unable to Handle Unicode Catalog

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This article was previously published under Q305351

SYMPTOMS

Commerce Server application programming interfaces (APIs) may fail when you attempt to create a catalog and add a product with non-English characters on an English version of Commerce Server.

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CAUSE

The stored procedures and the catalog object that are involved in creating a catalog and adding products do not handle Unicode characters correctly.

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To resolve this problem, obtain the latest service pack for Microsoft Commerce Server 2000. For additional information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

297216 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/297216/EN-US/ ) INFO: How to Obtain the Latest Commerce Server 2000 Service Pack

The English version of this fix should have the following file attributes or later:

   Date         Time     Version     Size     File name    Platform
   ----------------------------------------------------------------
   Aug-07-2001  11:23    4.0.2082.0  467,216  Catalog.dll  Intel

After you run the Hotfixsetup.exe file, run Catalogupgrade.sql (included in the hotfix package) in the SQL Query Analyzer against every catalog.

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WORKAROUND

Utilize a localized version of Commerce server to handle localized data. For example, the English version of Commerce server should not contain Unicode data that is based on other localized languages.

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STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in Microsoft Commerce Server 2000. This problem was first corrected in Microsoft Commerce Server 2000 Service Pack 2.

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MORE INFORMATION

SQL Profiler traces reveal that CatalogCreate fails because a stored procedure does not have the proper Unicode indentifier (nvarchar) when the SQL commands are constructed. CatalogCreate is in one transaction, and if one stored procedure fails, the entire API fails.

The Commerce 2000 BizDesk currently does not contain functionality to handle Unicode data and cannot display the double-byte character catalog name and data. This is a functional limitation. The catalog API functionality is the only means of accessing the Unicode data that may originate from localized language-specific data. Only catalog data that originates from a single language should be used with BizDesk.

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