MACROMEDIA COLDFUSION MX 61-DEVELOPING COLDFUSION MX, Develop Manual

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386 Chapter 17: Developing Globalized Applications
Database administrators configure data sources and usually are required to specify the character
encodings for character column data. Many of the major vendors, such as Oracle, Sybase, and
Informix, support storing character data in many character encodings, including Unicode UTF-8
and UTF-16.
The database drivers supplied with ColdFusion MX correctly handle data conversions from the
database native format to the ColdFusion Unicode format. You should not have to perform any
additional processing to access databases. However, you should always check with your database
administrator to determine how your database supports different character encodings.
E-mail
ColdFusion sends e-mail messages using the
cfmail
,
cfmailparam
, and
cfmailpart
tags.
By default, ColdFusion sends mail in UTF-8 encoding. You can specify a different default
encoding in the ColdFusion MX Administrator Mail page, and you can use the
charset
attribute
of the
cfmail
and
cfmailpart
tags to specify the character encoding for a specific mail message
or part of a multipart mail message.
HTTP
ColdFusion MX supports HTTP communication using the
cfhttp
and
cfhttpparam
tags and
the
GetHttpRequestData
function.
The
cfhttp
tag supports making HTTP requests. The
cfhttp
tag uses the Unicode UTF-8
encoding for passing data by default, and you can use the
charset
attribute to specify the
character encoding. You can also use the
cfhttpparam
tag
mimeType
attribute to specify the
MIME type and character set of a file.
LDAP
ColdFusion MX supports LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) through the
cfldap
tag. LDAP uses the UTF-8 encoding format, so you can mix all retrieved data with other data and
safely manipulated it. No extra processing is required to support LDAP.
WDDX
ColdFusion MX supports the
cfwddx
tag. ColdFusion stores WDDX (Web Distributed Data
Exchange) data as UTF-8 encoding, so it automatically supports double-byte character
encodings. You do not have to perform any special processing to handle double-byte characters
with WDDX.
COM
ColdFusion MX supports COM through the
cfobject type="com"
tag. All string data used in
COM interfaces is constructed using wide characters (wchars), which support double-byte
characters. You do not have to perform any special processing to interface with COM objects.
CORBA
ColdFusion MX supports CORBA through the
cfobject type="corba"
tag. The CORBA 2.0
interface definition language (IDL) basic type “String” used the Latin-1 character encoding,
which used the full 8-bits (256) to represent characters.