Re: Getting started on Multiple Language apps

Jacob Salomon <jake@garpac.com> wrote: :Hi Family. : :The FourGen-based application I support has been running fine in US :factories & distributorships. I have been asked to look onto a :"foreign" language conversion. I might start with French but we have our :eyes on other languages as well. : :I am a total neophyte on this topic. I can pronounce "DBLANG" and that's :about it. Do you want your application or only the database to be language aware. The application is the hard part. You will have to take out all strings you display or print and read them from a file or database table. There is a nice system for doing that from files in the Power 4GL package. Check out http://www.rl.is/~john/pow4gl.html :I have OnLine 7.13 with the 7.14 DAT sitting on my desk. Basic questions :are: : :Do I need to upgrade to 7.20+ to get full support of changing languages? : :Is there a simple sideways conversion to take my app into another :language? : :Do I need the full GLS package? What did Informix do before NLS and GLS :were buzzwords? With some 5.x version of their engines they started to support 8 bit character sets. In old versions of 4GL that didn't work at all. In newer versions it works fine. You do need to support 8 bit character set as a minimum (you would need 16 bit for Japan, China and other places). You need to select a proper 8 bit character set. The main one is of course the same used in MS Windows for the US and most of Western Europe (and yes down south and east some places where they speek english). On unix this would be ISO 8859-something. For some east european languages you would need another version of the ISO 8859. Don't forget that it isn't easy (that is hardly possible) to transport data from one database with one of these character sets to one with another. If data interchange is a requirement you again have to go to 16 bit characters all over. I have never bothered to use NLS or GLS. One day I probably will. As I understand them they are supposed to give you correct sort order (collation sequence) for different national languages among several other things. If that is a requirement (it often is) you need one of these. As they are quite different I wouldn't even bother trying out NLS as GLS is the new way for all new versions of the engine. Both NLS and GLS also support 8 bit characters used in table, column and other names in the database. That would be real stupid to utilize and give you nothing but problems. I hardly understand why Informix did something as stupid as that, but assume it was due to requirements from customers who don't know their own best. Just don't do it. The major consern otherwise is the date formats that vary a lot. Most of Western Europe use either YYYY-MM-DD or DD-MM-YYYY instead of the roundabout US system of MM-DD-YYYY. For our 4GL applications we simply set DBDATE for this. If you for some strange reason use the money datatype (as opposed to straight decimal) you obviously have to take care of that as well with the appropriate currency signs. Remember that many of them need more than one character position to display (up to three I think). We never use them, partly because of their size, but mainly because we need to support multiple currencies simultaneously and the money datatype doesn't do that. Of course when you do go international you may need to support different currencies in your database at the same time. One invoice in DM, the next in Pound. Do remember that large parts of Europe intend to switch to the Euro within a short time (a few years). At that time anyone printing an invoice will probably want to be able to print it using one currency and receive the payment in another. If your FourGen package doesn't allready support that I would look hard into this problem as well. :Where do I start? With the GLS manual awailable at http://www.informix.com/answers Nils.Myklebust@idg.no NM Data AS, P.O.Box 9090 Gronland, N-0133 Oslo, Norway My opinions are those of my company The Informix FAQ is at http://www.iiug.org