Invalid character found converting string ABAP Extract Stage

[bart2906]

After some scanning through these forums on an error I received while running a SAP ABAP extract job and unable to find the answer, I have found solutions to our issues and thought it would be worthwhile to post my findings here.

While running the ABAP Extract jobs, we received the following errors:
Message Id: IIS-DSEE-TFCC-00016
Message: APT_CombinedOperatorController,0: Invalid character(s) ([x81]) found converting Unicode string (code point(s): [xE3]) to UTF-8, substituting.
and mutliple versions of the same error.

After investigation, we have discovered that the error can be related to a few issues with the job:

1. Our SAP Servers have a timeout limit of 600 seconds(and this is a fairly standard setting in SAP), meaning that any program running in SAP for more than 600 seconds is automatically terminated. When our datastage jobs reached this time limit(due to extraction of large quantities of data), SAP would cancel the job and the error we received in Datastage for this scenario is the error message displayed above. You may or may not be able to convince your SAP BASIS team to change this setting.

2. The second scenario is when the SQL Query setup in the ABAP extract stage does not return any records from the SAP database. Due to the line of code PERFORM SEND_RECORD USING D_PACK found directly after the ENDSELECT statement in the program. If the Select statement fails for any reason, such as an incorrectly specified WHERE clause, this line of code will still attempt to send data to SAP. For this scenario we also received the error message found above.

3. Lastly, we found that if the column DISPLAY has a length value that is not exactly double the value found in the LENGTH column in the columns tab of the ABAP Extract stage, we also experienced the error message above. This requirement is due to the line of code found in the generated ABAP program d_offset = d_offset * 2. where the length of data being sent to SAP is doubled just before it actually performs this task.

[chulett]

Nice, thanks for posting that here. :D

[tsamui]

Thanks lot. Your solution worked in our issue.