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Julian Zalutsky describes an interesting issue:
> I have a problem: client program doesn't see national symbols
> in error message from SP commands:
> LET msgtxt = 'russian phrase';
> RAISE EXCEPTION -746, 0, msgtxt;
>
> But following commands works nice:
> SELECT russian_text_field FROM Any_Table;
> UPDATE Any_Table SET russian_text_field = 'any national text';

You mentioned that the environment variables, connection strings, and CSDK don't change, and you tried two engine versions, so I suspect RAISE EXCEPTION is not returning an NCHAR. Unfortunately, I could not find anything to confirm this, so you are left opening a case with Informix support to find out if this is a known issue. From them, you will probably hear a lot of encouragement to get off of 9.21. Actually, many on this list would probably echo that.

As a sort of workaround, perhaps you could put the error message in a table, possibly temp and have the application pull it out of there, or else just send the exception and let the app generate the message. This, of course, depends, on what you need in msgtxt.

In our app, we have a log table we put all significant diagnostic messages in. If you have something like that, maybe you could raise the exception and msgtxt could be the numeric key to the diagnostic_log row.

I hate GLS. I hate 9.21's GLS, especially. It is difficult to work with, and there are so many undiscovered issues to stumble across. The later versions are better, but there always seems to be one more environment variable than you checked, or one more locale issue, or one more manual you did not read quite carefully enough.

Fortunately for me, I do not work with it much, anymore. That is unfortunate for you, as I have no other advice.

Sincerely,

Christopher Coleman

Steering Committee President
Kansas City Informix Users Group
www.iiug.org/kciug

Database Analyst
Pharmacy Division
Mediware Information Systems, Inc.