Microsoft® SNA Server is a product composed of many components, including 3270 applet, 5250 applet, and NetView services. In past versions of SNA Server, most components have used a variety of methods for supporting different national languages and character sets and for converting between EBCDIC and ANSI. For Far Eastern languages such as Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, the TrnsDT API was used for double-byte character stream (DBCS) conversions. For other languages, a component's own proprietary functions were often used for single-byte character stream (SBCS) conversions. It was common for two components or applications to use different functions for converting strings from EBCDIC to ANSI and from ANSI to EBCDIC. The methods used were quite varied and the code page support was not entirely consistent across products.
All of this changed with the release of SNA Server version 3.0. Now there is a standard SNA National Language Support (SNANLS) API for supporting national languages. The SNANLS API was developed to standardize the way in which national languages and locales are supported on SNA Server. SNANLS was designed to handle string conversion necessary for supporting a wide range of host and PC code pages. The new components developed for SNA Server 3.0, such as the Host Print Service and Shared Folders Service, use SNANLS API to convert strings from EBCDIC to ANSI and from ANSI to EBCDIC.
The SNA National Language Support API is the new standard means to convert strings in SNA Server. SNANLS presents a single interface to applications that need strings converted from one code page to another, from EBCDIC to ANSI, and from ANSI to EBCDIC. Additionally, SNANLS supports the broadest possible range of host and PC code page conversions.
SNANLS provides a uniform interface for programmers, hiding the details and difficulties of string conversion. SNANLS supports both SBCS and DBCS conversions. The actual string conversion is handled by two other lower-level APIs. For SBCS conversions, SNANLS uses the system-provided Win32® NLS API that is resident on Microsoft® Windows NT® versions 3.51 and 4.0. For use on Microsoft® Windows® 95 systems, the SNA Server SNANLS.DLL includes integrated support for NLS and Unicode conversions on Windows 95. For DBCS conversions, SNANLS uses the TrnsDT API installed by SNA Server 3.0 and later and developed by the SNA Server team.
SNANLS is supported on Windows NT and Windows 95. The goal for all future development is to use only SNANLS.