The XML properties feature has been submitted to Jira -
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OFBIZ-1442.
Many thanks to everyone for their input!
-Adrian
Adrian Crum wrote:
David Jones has suggested in the past that we start moving away from
using properties files for UI labels and such, and use XML files
instead. That subject has come up again in
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OFBIZ-1425.
I would be interested in helping out with the implementation, but I'd
like to get input from the developer community first.
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Here are some of the suggestions David made:
"If we do something like that, here or anywhere, we should use XML and
not properties files. XML is about 1E6 times better than properties
files (name/value pairs) for organizing this sort of information. It is
hierarchical so much easier to organize and you can use real UTF-8
characters there instead of having to encode everything and use a
special tool or a translator to work on the files."
and
"In XML there are standard ways of doing this, namely using the xml:lang
attribute on an element to specify the language of the content in an
element."
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I have been thinking about this for a while, and I was picturing a
refactoring of the resource handling code so that it can read xml files
in addition to *.properties files. The file format would be invisible
from a programmer's perspective. In other words, the method call
UtilProperties.getPropertyValue("SomeResource", "SomeProperty") would
still work even if the "SomeResource" resource was in an XML file.
Or we can just have a utility to retrieve resources from an XML file.
Regardless of how the properties are retrieved, we still need to come up
with a strategy (or schema) for the xml file format. I'm not an XML
guru, so this is one area where I could use some help.
Do we continue to keep each language in a separate file or should we
have all properties for all languages in a single file?
Are there any other issues anyone can think of?
Comments welcome.
-Adrian
