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Rational Team Concert - SCM control of USS files - any codepage problems with certain types?


Donald Poulin (2249119107) | asked Nov 28 '12, 12:21 p.m.
A customer has RTC 4.0 and is looking in to bringing certain files used/referenced by CICS programs and which are stored under USS under SCM control. The different types are - css, jss, jpg, pdf and html (both ascii and edcidic variations). The files are created/update via PCs and then ftp'd to USS. If the are brought under RTC change control will there be any problems related to "codepage" as files are brought in to RTC and then "pushed" back out to USS?

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Chris McGee (50511117) | answered Nov 28 '12, 10:07 p.m.
FORUM MODERATOR / JAZZ DEVELOPER
Putting existing files under source control should not interfere with the character encoding of the files. They will be stored in the character encoding that was used by your editor to create or edit the files. When they are loaded the original character encoding is preserved.

You should take care to set the mime-type, character encoding and line delimiter metadata on each file when they are first shared or checked-in so that Jazz SCM can use this information to check the consistency of the line-endings, allow merging of conflicts and show line annotations.

You can find this information in the property dialog by right-clicking on the file from the package/project explorer in the RTC eclipse client. In the RTC CLI client you can use the "lscm list properties" and "lscm property set" subcommands.

To set the default mime-type and line delimiters for a particular file extension you can use the Team->Jazz Source Control->File Properties preference page for the RTC eclipse client or create a magic.properties file in your .jazz-scm directory for the RTC CLI.

When pushing files from your PC to z/OS USS the files may be converted from ASCII to EBCDIC if you are in ascii mode in the ftp client. The ascii mode will even attempt to convert them if they are already in EBCDIC. To transfer files as-is then you need to use binary mode.

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John Riendeau commented Nov 29 '12, 3:58 p.m.
JAZZ DEVELOPER

Note that it's not always the case that loading files preserves the original character encoding -- there are cases where the RTC SCM will convert files from the encoding in which they are stored in the repository.  The primary case is when loading files to the MVS filesystem on z/OS but loads to z/OS USS can be configured to do this conversion as well.  (A more detailed description of the algorithm used to determine which, if any, conversion to apply can be found here).

I agree with the gist of this answer, though -- if FTP is being used to push the files to USS, rather than loading directly to USS from RTC, none of these conversion routines will apply, the original encoding will be preserved when loading from the repository to the PC, and conversion may or may not be done by FTP itself, depending on whether FTP is in ASCII or binary mode.

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