How serialized strings are encoded and decoded

Like BMC Remedy AR System 6.3 server, BMC Remedy AR System 7.0.01 and later servers encode and decode serialized strings using character lengths implied by the server's character encoding. (The BMC Remedy AR System 7.0.00 server computes strings using character lengths implied by the client's character encoding.)

The server encodes and decodes these strings using the Application-Parse-Qual and Application-Format-Qual actions performed by filters and active links. The ARDecodeARQualifierStruct and ARDecodeARAssignStruct C API calls (and Encode variants of those functions) also process serialized strings.

This issue does not affect most serialized strings because they contain only ASCII characters. In every character encoding supported by BMC Remedy AR system, each ASCII character occupies exactly 1 byte. The lengths of non-ASCII characters depend on the character encoding in use. For example, a qualifier such as 'Submitter' LIKE "%à%" produces a serialized string that counts the à as 1 byte in the standard Windows "Code Page 1252" encoding, but 2 bytes in UTF-8. Clients and servers generate errors if presented with strings that have incorrect lengths.