Multilingual Applications

The program in Figure 7-4 “Multilingual Application” shows a localizable or multilingual application. This application can be used in several countries or in multiple languages by different users on the same system. The key attribute of this program is that it selects its language(s) at run time.

When installing an application on a system, the manager of the application may establish configuration file(s) for that application. These files store information about various end-users or transactions and their native language requirements. At run time, the application program can determine which language(s) to use.

The program may call the NLGETLANG intrinsic to obtain the system default language (which can be set by the system manager when native languages are configured), or it may prompt the end user to enter a language name or ID number (langnum).

The application may call NLGETLANG to obtain the user interface language and/or the data manipulation language. The job control words NLUSERLANG and NLDATALANG must be in place before invoking this type of application. This method could be too restrictive if many end users or transactions requiring different languages are handled from one job or session.

Once the languages have been determined, the program opens the appropriate VPLUS forms files, message catalogs, and/or command files, based on the user interface language choice. It also opens any needed IMAGE databases, KSAM files, or general data files; these may or may not depend upon language choice. The appropriate language ID numbers are used in calling the various native language intrinsics. Different end users may concurrently run the same program with different languages. The application can be designed to use more than one language within a single execution. For example, one language may be used for data manipulation and a different one for user interactions.

Figure 7-4 Multilingual Application