Sometimes, a user reports an error whereby their iPad or iPhone using Citrix Receiver will map a keyboard incorrectly, even though they have selected their preferred language. For example, a user prefers a French language keyboard (AZERTY) but is unknowingly receiving a QWERTY keyboard. As these keyboards are very similar, this may only be noticed by the user as a typing mismatch - pressing 'z' generates an 'a' and vice versa.

 

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The use of 7.16 VDA, with the Unicode Keyboard Mapping feature activated, is intended to better handle this kind of keyboard layout preference issues, and has been shown to resolve cases where previous fixes for this issue did not.

To use, install 7.16 VDA - ideally, this will be part of an environment-wide upgrade, but is not strictly necessary as VDAs are generally backwards-compatible with earlier DDCs without negative impact - newer VDA features that rely on the DDC however will not be available.

Once installed, activate the feature (disabled by default) with the following registry keys:

Enable or disable Unicode keyboard layout mapping

By default, the feature is disabled on the VDA side. To enable the feature, toggle on the feature by using registry editor regedit on the VDA.
Under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Citrix, create the CtxKlMap key.
Set the DWORD value of EnableKlMap = 1

To disable this feature, set the DWORD value EnableKlMap = 0 or delete the CtxKlMap key.

Enable Unicode keyboard layout mapping compatible mode

By default, Unicode keyboard layout mapping automatically hooks some windows API to reload the new Unicode keyboard layout map when you change the keyboard layout on the server side. A few applications cannot be hooked. To keep compatibility, you can change the feature to compatible mode to support these non-hooked applications.

1. Under the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Citrix/CtxKlMap key, set the DWORD value DisableWindowHook =1.
2. To use normal Unicode keyboard layout mapping, set DWORD value DisableWindowHook = 0.

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Problem Cause

One reason for this is iPad/iPhone Receiver cannot handle local keyboard priority, if the server default language is different. It uses the server default in any case of confusion.

There are various fixes listed in other articles for this known issue, however this article is intended to highlight a new feature called Unicode Keyboard Mapping.