Setting the MQSeries CCSID by using an Environment Variable

During a smoke test of a new BizTalk Server 2016 (with HIS 2016 and the IBM MQ 8.0.0.8 client) we stumbled upon the following exception:

“The program ended because, either the source CCSID ‘1208’ or the target CCSID ‘437’ is not valid, or is not currently supported.”

In this simple test, we were sending and receiving messages to/from a queue with a couple of ports and did not yet use a pipeline component to set IBM MQ Series Context Properties.

But wait, we needed a way to set the CCSID to 1208!

Luckily, you can set an Environment Variable to specify the desired CCSID globally:

PowerShell (Run as Administrator):

[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable(“MQCCSID”, “1208”, [EnvironmentVariableTarget]::Machine)

MQCCSID: Specifies the coded character set number to be used and overrides the native CCSID of the application. (IBM Knowledge Center)

After applying this, the messages were sent using the correct CCSID: