Lotus Notes Portlets in Arabic

Question

I am encountring a problem with Lotus Notes Portlets, I want them to dispaly in arabic.
Note: they are running very good in English
I used the propertyResourceBundle way, and it indeed retreives the strings from the correct file -LotusBundle_ar.properties in my case , but as long as the strings are in English. If I changed the translated strings to arabic strings, it returns me a rubbish in the Portlet headers (e.g. From , Subject , Date Received , ToDo , ..). I tried to set the charSet in the getWriter() method and in PortletRenderRequest.setCharacterEncoding() to UTF-8 and WINDOWS-1256 charsets, in the InboxRenderer class and in the LotusProvider class but nothing worked it always returned me rubbish words, I also set the NLS_LANG of the ias machine which is a windows NT server machine to ARABIC_UNITED ARAB EMIRATES.AR8MSWIN1256, the charSet of the Portal db is not unicode but the NLS_LANG env. variable of the db machine is set to ARABIC_UNITED ARAB EMIRATES.UTF8 , but still nothing worked.
Notes: Arabic is installed on my portal (ver 3.0.9.8) and using the SetLanguage portlet i can switch between english and arabic in a seamless way, also the Database plsql Services Portlet sample is running well and it switches between Eng and Ar also -I have seeded the arabic strings to make it dispaly arabic.
The Notes Arabic cient is installed, and the Notes web access also runs now in arabic (it shows me the Inbox, Calendar, Contacts , ToDo documents all in arabic).
So where is the problem with web portlets, where exactly to set the charSet, I still have a doubt about the portal db charSet which is as I mentioned not unicode, it is American, but how the portal itself is running in arabic and the plsql portlets also while using this American charSet? Pls Oracle people do not let us lost that way. I'll try to use the ListResourceBundle way as maybe the encoding used when saving the .properties file is not correct, and then give u a feed back.
Pls all colleagues if any one can help, and give some guiding points, he will be greatly appreciated.
Amr
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Answer 1

Thanks Christopher for your reply ..
The Good news is that the problem is now solved when using the ListResourseBundle way, I think that my doubt was correct; the encoding used when saving the .properties files is some how Latin (e.g. US-ASCII for example), so that when retreiving the translated strings and writting them on the reponse object using WINDOWS-1256 charSet, some characters get lost, and hence I got the rubbish strings. The problem now is that you cannot provide more than one resourseBundle for one portlet,I need to provide Bilingual interface, so I have two resourseBundle classes for each portlet (e.g. InboxBundle_ar.class , InboxBundle_en.class). I Couldn't provide more than one resourse tage for each portlet in provider.xml, otherwise it gives an ERROR OCCURED! message in the rendered portlet body. So how to resolve this ?
The second problem, wchich is bigger, is that the dynamic strings returned from Lotus server are showing as rubbish strings (e.g the Subject itself of the message, Subject of an appointment,the Last name of a user in a Contacts list,..)althoug these strings are showing well in Arabic from the Lotus web access for the same logged in user. I think that the methods doc.getItemValueString(), doc.getColumnValues().get() are returning strings assuming Latin charSet, I tried to play the following code for the rendered message subject :
byte[] bytes = doc.getItemValueString("Subject").getBytes("US-ASCII");
String subj = new String(bytes,"WINDOWS-1256");
out.println("<td><FONT SIZE=2><a href=\""+readMsgURL+"\" target=\"_new\">"+subj+"</a></FONT></td>");
But unfortunately it didn't work, even when using UTF-8 and UTF-16 in the getBytes statment and when initializing the subj string. note: the out object is assuming the WINDOWS-1256 charset, I forced it to this charset by writting the following code in the renderShow method in the InboxRenderer class :
pr.setCharacterEncoding("WINDOWS-1256");
PrintWriter out = pr.getWriter("text/html","WINDOWS-1256");
where pr is the portletRenderRequest.
So what to do ??? If you can help me Christopher or pass the topic to any one of the people who wrote the Lotus Notes Portlets, to tell me how to overcome these two problems.
Note: It is an urgent requirement to arabize these Lotus Notes Portlets.
Thanks Christopher,
Thanks all
Amr