The conversionTable property of the callLink element in a linkage options part specifies the name of the conversion table that is used to convert data on a call to a program running on a remote server. Conversion is necessary when the code page used for encoding text on the server is different from the encoding used on the client. This is always the case when a Java™ client is calling a COBOL server, or when a COBOL client is calling a Java server. The conversion is performed on the calling program. The callLink element is defined for the program being called; the conversion table specifies what conversion needs to be performed when the client calls that program.
Programs supporting bidirectional languages, such as Arabic and Hebrew, can use bidi conversion tables to specify reordering of text data in addition to code page conversion. For more information, see Working with bidirectional data.