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Internationalization

Internationalization is the process of creating or modifying an application so that it can use the correct GLS locale to support different languages, territories, and code sets without changing or recompiling the code.

This process makes IBM Informix database applications easily adaptable to any culture and language. For a database application, you perform internationalization on the application that accesses a database, not on the database. The data in a database that the application accesses should already be in a language that the end user can understand.

To internationalize a database application, design the application so that the tasks in the following table do not make any assumptions about the language, territory, and code set that the application uses at runtime.

Application Task Description
User interfaces Includes any text that is visible to end users, including menus, buttons, prompts, help text, status messages, error messages, and graphics
Character
processing
Includes the following processing tasks:
  • Character classification
  • Character case conversion
  • Collation and sorting
  • Character versus byte processing
  • String traversal
  • Code-set conversion
Data
formatting
Includes any culture-specific formats for numeric, monetary, date, and time values
Documentation Includes any explanatory material such as printed manuals, online documentation, and README files
Debugging via
tracing
(IDS, DB API)
The DataBlade API provides the application or DataBlade developer the capability of using internationalized trace messages. It uses in-line code working with system catalog tables: systracemsgs and systraceclasses. For more information, see the IBM Informix: DataBlade API Programmer's Guide.

An internationalized application dynamically obtains language-specific information for these application tasks. Therefore, one executable file for the application can support multiple languages.

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