Jacques, David Not all strings are been externalized. Only strings that contain a " " are considered for externalization. These are the ones that are typically that is meant to be read by a person. There are other strings that are also meant be read like: value + "::" value, but to take these strings out will just make the developers job a lot harder in the long run (complexity).
To be able to do better than this implies that I will have to make the program understand what is a message. This can be done by looking at the context in which the string is used. It does not guarantee that the string is a message; it only gives a high probability that the string is a message. I will transform all the string keys to Name1Name2Name3... I will also use a spell checker to make sure that the names are at least spelled correctly. In the case where I don't know if the name is spelled ok then I will flag the key and check it. I will split the property files into 2 groups per module. Firstly the strings that goes into the logs. These have a low priority for been translated. Then all the other strings that need translation are placed in the other group. Jacques you are correct that these changes can stuff everything up. This is why I do not want to do the work piecemeal, but all in one go. This is why I am building programs to do the changes. Modifying these programs is not hard and a change to the way the externalization is done is relatively inexpensive. Jacques to answer your question as to why: I want to make the externalization changes as I want to localize ofbiz for Afrikaans. I have noticed some other problems in ofbiz that I think needs cleaning up, but I will get to this later. From looking at the changes that are committed it seems that most relate to business functionality been fixed or added. This is nice, but it does not address the issue of overall code quality decreasing with time due to entropy. It is the old thing, the older a system becomes the more messy things become unless you do some house cleaning now and then. Gerrie NOTE: This e-mail message is subject to the MTN Group disclaimer see http://www.mtn.co.za/default.aspx?pid=34411
