The last couple of years character encoding schemes like Unicode have increased in popularity. To support Unicode (as UCS-2 data) the Unicode data type (W) was introduced in version 2.1 of the ITP/SDK for iSeries.
The ITP/SDK for iSeries does not automatically differentiate between several character data encoding schemes. When (re-) generating an Entry, Formal parameter types are automatically set to type Text (T). When the Formal parameter is intended to contain UCS-2 data the Formal parameter type must always be changed manually to Unicode (W) to let ITP know that Unicode characters have to be passed to the data retrieval mechanism.
An important restriction of the Unicode data type in the ITP/SDK for iSeries is that the length of the Formal parameter must be an even number of bytes, because UCS-2 is a double byte character set. The order of the two bytes must be the native iSeries order. This means that "normal" characters like the "A" are represented with 0 in the first byte and 65 in the second byte.