The whole multi-language aspect of IBO needs to be re-thought out. I would
like to do something along these lines.

At the foundation level of IBO there is a Session and then an IB_Component
that has an IB_Session property. I would like to make it so that the session
level has a language property and then if a person wants multiple languages
for an application they just include the additional units with the
translations in it. There would be some sort of event that would trigger
each IB_Component that the language changed and all controls, forms, etc.
could respond to this event and recalculate their strings based on the
language.

Each language unit compiled into the EXE would register itself to a global
list during initialization that the session could build a list of languages
to chose from. Of course if nothing was added English would be the only
language.

The hard part of this is to decide how to handle the resolving of the
language strings. Do I make one massive array where each unique message
string is accessed as an array element. Then, if someone wants to write an
additional language add-in for IBO is all they would have to do is supply
the translation for each array item. I would Allow blank to go to the
default (English) so that as new items are added I can simply add blank
entries until the translators get a chance to fill in where I wasn't able
to.

Also, rather than have one massive array I think I would break it up to
error messages, captions, hints, etc. so that it would be a little more
organized by category.

How does this sound to you folks out there that are using international
languages?

I could also allow it to hook into an external DLL as well...

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Jason Wharton
CPS - Mesa AZ
http://www.ibobjects.com

----- Original Message -----
From: "Kaputnik" <ibolist@...>
To: "IBObjects List" <IBObjects@egroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, November 29, 2000 12:05 PM
Subject: [IBO] Suggestions for 4.0


> Hi Jason,
>
> one suggestion from me for the next version:
>
> The IB_connection can hold much pre-prepared stuff for the Datasets like
> Displaylabels, Alignment and so on.
> As I always work with custom hints for my datasets (I have stringlists for
> two languages for my dual-language-apps) it would be a great help, if I
> could define custom hints (for the IBOBars and so on) at the
> connection-level. For now, i have to replace the stringlist for every
> Dataset in my app, when the user changes the language, what can be very
> cumbersome. A centralized repository for the hints to be used as default
> when the hints of the dataset are empty would be really cool.
> I know, that I can change the hints in the Constants.pas, but that won't
> help me for multi-lang-apps.
>
> Thanx for the attention and
> CU, Kaputnik
> (Nick Josipovic)
>
> nick@...
> kap@...
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