Unicode support

Unicode is a unification of all (or at least: almost all) currently available character sets.

See http://www.unicode.org.

TSS is the Baan proprietary character set, and contains all the native character sets supported by the Enterprise Server porting set.

For many years, Unicode and TSS were independent.

Mapping between the two became available in the Enterprise Server porting set. TSS was used internally, and at the borders of the system conversion from and to Unicode became available. Examples are: communication with the UI and exchange of XML documents. The conversion was run through external tables, one pair of 128 KB tables for each supported native character set.

The next change in the relationship between Unicode and TSS was to embed the complete Unicode character set in TSS. In this way it became possible to always use TSS internally, and simultaneously support all Unicode characters, independent of supported native character sets. Conversion between TSS and Unicode at the borders of the system became a matter of some algorithmic bit shuffling and no longer required conversion tables.