Codepage conversion changes

CICS® is enhanced to provide a means of converting between EBCDIC or ASCII and Unicode data. Conversion can occur in either direction.

To use the data conversion methods described here, as opposed to those offered by earlier releases of CICS, you must be communicating your data using channels or containers, as described in the CICS Application Programming Guide.

CICS documents and document templates cannot be converted to or from the UTF-8 and UTF-16 character encodings. This restriction applies whether they are used as a static response in CICS Web support, retrieved by CICS in response to EXEC CICS WEB API commands, or retrieved by an application program using an EXEC CICS DOCUMENT RETRIEVE command.

Appendix F of the z/OS Support for Unicode: Using Conversion Services manual -SA22 -7649 records those conversions which are supported though these services. These are not limited to Unicode, but include the ability to convert between a broad range of character encodings, including EBCDIC, ASCII and Unicode.
Note: The conversion between 037 and 500, as used, for example, with the MQ transport is an EBCDIC to EBCDIC conversion brought about by small differences in the character encodings used by CICS and MQ.

CICS now supports any of these character conversions by making use of the z/OS conversion services. However, those conversions that earlier releases of CICS carried out using a set of tables, continue to be supported in that manner. It is only if CICS TS 3.1 is asked to carry out a conversion between a pair of CCSIDs that are unsupported via these tables, that it attempts the conversion using the z/OS services.