Problem:        How To support multiple languages using build targets

Solution:        Using multiple Build Targets in your application project enables easier support of multiple language versions of your application

At the present time Satellite Forms does not offer special features to support localization of an application into different languages.  However, you can add additional targets to your application in the same platform (eg. multiple Palm targets), so you could have an English target, French target, etc.  You would need to modify the UI of your application to the different languages in each target, but you could keep that in a single project file with common code, rather than multiple projects.  It would probably be easier to maintain that multi-target project than it would be to maintain multiple projects each with a single target.

You can set different control properties on a per-target basis, including the text of the control.  Go to the French target, and display the form, click on the button to select it.  In the control property space, uncheck that checkbox to the left of the Text property. 

Then, change the text to suit that target.  Switch to the other target, and change the text as needed.  That checkbox column indicates whether that control property is shared (checked) by all targets, or private (unchecked) for that target only.

Note also that you can have both shared and private global functions and subs, with the private ones existing in the current target only.  So, you can have different scripts with the same function names between targets, which could for example do some target-specific things relating to the different languages.

The SF runtime engine itself does use string resources for error messages that you could modify with an external localization tool (RsrcEdit for example), and you could do the same with the standard menu contents as well.  This would mean you would have language-specific versions of the runtime engine.

Keywords:      localization, internationalization, language, targets

KB ID: 10028 

Updated: 2010-06-22

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