Preparation of an International Application

Article
10/23/2006

Preparing an international application usually involves three steps: creating data, writing code, and designing a user interface. Before you take these steps, however, you need to consider the following questions:

What data is acceptable?
How do you write code for an international application?
What should you consider when designing a user interface?

The following sections address these questions and pose others you need to consider before you prepare your application.

Tip You can reduce the cost of developing an international application and bring it to market more quickly by designing it as an international application initially rather than modifying it for international use later on.

Preparing the International Data

To create international data for an application, you can enter it manually, import it from other applications, or append it to existing files and memo fields. For details about importing and appending data, see Importing and Exporting Data.

What Data Is Acceptable?

To decide what data is acceptable, first consider the locales in which the application will be used. The locales will determine the cultural content of the data as well as the languages in which the data is prepared.

In addition, the languages will affect the code page with which the data is prepared. A code page is a character set that a computer uses to display data properly, often to handle international characters. International characters include characters that have diacritical marks. Diacritical marks are placed over, under, or through letters to indicate sound changes from the unmarked form. The most common diacritical marks are the grave accent (` as in ), acute accent ( as in ), circumflex (^ as in ), tilde (~ as in ), umlaut ( as in ), ring ( as in ), and slash (/ as in ), all used in conjunction with vowels.

Ordinarily, data is automatically marked with the appropriate code page when you work with it. However, if you manually assign a code page to a table, or if you otherwise cause the code page to change, users might not recognize some or all of the data displayed. For details about code pages, see Code Pages in Visual FoxPro.

Some languages, such as Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, use DBCS (double-byte character sets) to represent their data. If your application might run in these environments, you might need to use special string-handling functions and collation sequences for the application to work properly. For details about working in DBCS environments, see Application Creation with Double-Byte Character Sets.

How Do You Write Code?

An application consists of a user interface component and an application component. The user interface component contains graphics, text strings, and settings related to various locales, such as dates, currencies, numeric values, and separators. The application component contains the code that is run for all locales, including code that processes the strings and graphics used in the user interface.

The components of an application

When designing your application, keep the application and user interface components separate, because independent components make the application easier to localize and maintain. For example, with separate components, you don't have to browse the source code to localize interface elements. For more information about writing code, see Creating or Modifying Programs.

How Do You Design a User Interface?

The menus, forms, controls, toolbars, and bitmaps used in the user interface must serve the locales for which you're designing the application. For example, if you design the application for users in Germany and France, dialog boxes must be large enough to display instructions properly when the instructions are localized in German and French. In addition, the images used in icons and bitmaps must be culturally correct so that they're understood in the target locales. For more information about designing user interfaces, see Design of the Interface.

Testing the Application

To test an international application, you need to check the country and language dependencies of the locale for which the application is designed. Testing involves checking the application's data and user interface to ensure that they conform to the locale's standards for date and time, numeric values, currency, list separators, and measurements.