Release 10.1A: OpenEdge Development:
Internationalizing Applications

Guidelines and methodology

An application that can potentially run worldwide follows certain application design and programming conventions that keep code as flexible as possible to accommodate the cultural, linguistic, technical, and legal differences between locales.

When designing your application and planning for its maintainability, you have to balance the economy of a single code source against the international customer requirements for localized applications with regional code sources.

The programming conventions affect how you write OpenEdge code. These are the general guidelines to follow when programming an international application:

Process character data as characters—not bytes.
Use variables instead of hard-coded values that might vary internationally. Make provisions for procedure substitution for instances when an algorithm changes for a particular locale (for example, tax laws).
Code with translation in mind, prepare for string expansion, and identify string constants that should not be translated (for example, strings in queries and keywords).

The following sections discuss the general issue of how to structure your code and the specific programming conventions.