Globalize your On Demand Business

In Domino Designer 6, you can create a simple multilingual database in Domino Designer - perhaps one that consists of just a single form and view. A new set of features makes this possible:

• Default status and language database property. Working in Domino Designer, you can define a Notes database as being "Multilingual," and you can assign a default language to a multilingual database. The default language is the language the database will be displayed in when users have set a language preference in their client or browser that is not available. This is simply the manual way to do what DGW does for you automatically. Domino Global WorkBench turns the multilingual switch on automatically when you create a multilingual database. And if you do not specify a default language, Domino Global WorkBench sets it up for you (it will be the first language you choose when you build the multilingual database with DGW). Like DGW itself, Domino Designer supports both languages and sublanguages. Developers can customize an application for different groups of users who speak the same language but who require regional nuances -- for example, American English and Australian English. This capability is made possible using standard ISO (International Organization for Standardization) conventions -- ISO 639 and ISO 3166. ISO 639 is the code for the specified language. It defines languages with a two-character identifier. ISO 3166 is the code for the specified country. It provides basic two-letter alphabetic codes. For instance, en-US stands for American English by the Internet standards (where en is the ISO 639 language code, and US is the ISO 3166 country code).
• Language identifiers for design elements: Domino Designer 6 allows developers to assign language identifiers to each design element, one identifier for each language in the database.
• @functions to enhance your multilingual applications: Within Designer, you can now use the following @functions:
  • @LanguagePreference([Content]) returns the 'Preferred Content Language' setting from the Notes client or the HTTP packet from a Web browser. The value returned is a list of one or more strings, each of which consists of two or five characters. The first two characters give the preferred language (for example, "en" for English) and the last two characters, if present, give the country variant (for example, "US" for the United States). This @function is useful when you want to have users click on a link that will automatically bring them to a page in the same language they use in their Notes client or Web browser. You can use @LanguagePreference([Content]) to figure out the URL to which you want to send the user.
  • @FormLanguage returns the language of the form used to compose the document. In databases built by Domino Global WorkBench, the value returned is a string of five characters of the form xx-YY —for example, "en-US" for United States English. Often @FormLanguage is more useful than @LanguagePreference since @FormLanguage can only return a language supported by the database. For example, suppose someone is working in a multilingual database that supports French, German, and English, and suppose the user’s primary language is Dutch, a language not supported by the database. Then, the user will either see the database documents in the default language, or, if the user is using a browser and has set an available secondary language such as German, he will see documents in that language. Either way, if the user composes documents in which the $Language field is given its value by @LanguagePreference, those documents will not be visible in any of the standard views because (usually) the views will select only French, German, or English documents. If, however, @FormLanguage is used instead of @LanguagePreference to give $Language its value, the Dutch user’s documents will display in the views that he is able to see.

Continue to "Notes 6 -- a good multilingual citizen"