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Crystal Reports Support for GB18030 Through Unicode

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Crystal Reports for Visual Studio does not support GB18030 directly. Instead it accesses GB18030 through values that have already been converted to one of the Unicode encoding forms.

Conversions are provided from a number of sources including the .NET Framework, certain database drivers, and the Windows operating system. Text is typically stored on the hard drive as UTF-8, and loaded into memory as UTF-16. Crystal Reports supports Unicode surrogate pairs in UTF-16.

Examples of GB18030 support using Unicode

The most important areas to be aware of where GB18030 support is provided through Unicode conversion are the following:

  • Databases that contain GB18030-encoded data.

    Database data encoded in GB18030 is supported only when the database driver translates the data to UTF-16 at retrieval time.

    Note

    Microsoft SQL Server 2005 translates GB18030 data to UTF-16 at retrieval time. For other servers, consult your database provider.

  • DataSets that exposes data from a GB18030 source.

    Whatever the original source, DataSets are formatted as XML, which is encoded with UTF-8.

  • Web services that expose data from a GB18030 source.

    All text sent or received over a Web service is already converted to Unicode.

GB18030 scenarios not supported

The primary situation where GB18030 is not supported by Crystal Reports is the accessing or importing of GB18030-encoded text files.

The GB18030-encoded text file must first be converted to Unicode by a third party, at which point Crystal Reports can then interact with the Unicode-encoded text file.