by cdshearer >> Tue, 26 Mar 2002 9:06:32 GMT
Hello All
I'm currently investing some internationalization issues for a system using JADE.
I'm aware that different locales like to sort their strings differently from us English folk and I'm wondering whether this is actually possible in JADE.
When I'm defining a MemberKeyDictionary subclass and I add a String key, I can choose the sort order as either Binary or a specific locale. This would be all very well if I was commissioned to build a system for a Chinese customer and they wanted all their dictionaries to sort in whatever order is appropriate in Chinese. However, what if I'm building a system to be used in many different locales? In this case, defining the sort order at design time is bloody useless!!!
For a system that is installed in a single locale, I'd like all dictionaries with String keys to sort for that locale when the dictionary was created.
For multi-locale systems, I realise that we can't have dictionaries appearing in the correct order depending upon the client machine's locale as that would involve re-sorting the collections for each user. So, in this instance the only solution would be to use dynamically created dictionaries (such as instances of an existing Dictionary class, or a DynaDictionary) and thus have the sort order defined for String keys at time of instantiation.
Has anybody encountered this problem before and if so, how have you solved it? Actually, I don't think there is any existing solution in JADE and this really would require some fairly hefty new features to support this. Perhaps people in other locales are just used to putting up with incorrectly sorted lists in their non-local software products.
Craig